He’s a good guy with a gun who saved a cop's life ​​​​​​​— and he’s for gun control

Time seemed to slow for Thomas Yoxall.

He soaked in the details: the four flares set up roadside, the patrol car’s lights in the pre-dawn darkness. The trooper on the ground that a man was pummeling.

Yoxall pulled his car over and exited. He held his handgun in a three-quarter draw, ready to fire.

He walked step over step, trying to keep himself as narrow a potential target as possible.

Yoxall yelled at the man to back away from the trooper; the man did not. Instead, he raised his fists high in the air.

Yoxall saw his opportunity.

He fired three times. He watched through the gun sights as the second and third shots hit their mark and said he had no doubt about his accuracy. 

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Yoxall, 44, of El Mirage, Ariz., saved the patrolman’s life that January morning on Interstate 10 between Tonopah and Quartzite, Ariz., about 40 miles west of Phoenix. He also lived out an argument-ending episode on why upstanding individuals should be armed. 

Yoxall believes that. He also believes ownership should be restricted.

Part of that comes from his own knowledge that guns are not always used for good.

He has been on the wrong end of a gun at least four times during confrontations in his youthful hellion days. Those were four times when he also could have fired at a person and had that homicide potentially ruled a justified use of force.

When the story of what he had done was initially reported, no one knew anything about Yoxall: Not his name. Not that he was heavily tattooed, that he was a journeyman plumber who dabbled in portrait photography. Not that he was a former felon.

The public knew only what he did on the side of the freeway.

And for that, Yoxall was given a title: Good Samaritan.

In the biblical story, a man is beaten and left lying on the side of the road. Two people pass by the man.

But a man from Samaria, a region that feuded with the Jewish people to whom Jesus told the parable, stopped to help. The Samaritan tended to the man's wounds and took him to a nearby inn.

No one died in that tale.

What is similar in the stories is that people who could have stopped to help kept moving.

“I loathe society,” Yoxall said. He figured dozens of cars must have driven by the scene. He said he later was told no one called 911.

“I can’t fathom that," he said.

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Yoxall said he had no choice but to stop. Throughout his life, he had always seen himself in the role of a protector.

This incident validated that notion.

"You always hope that at that moment, that critical moment, you can be able to perform based on what your convictions are," he said. "You never know until that moment of truth."

A rocky start

In 1999, Yoxall was not a Good Samaritan. He was a youth counselor working at a group home in Glendale, Ariz., called Pathways.

He didn’t get along with many of the kids and thought they were stealing from him, according to court records. He devised a plan to even the score.

One evening, he drove the group of residents to a movie. He returned to the home and, with an accomplice, stole stuff: a Playstation gaming console, a CD player, a camera and other items easily fenced, which is what Yoxall did.

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When the juveniles came back and saw their belongings gone, Yoxall called police to report the theft. Months later, someone implicated him in the crime, telling police they were afraid Yoxall would shoot the tipster if he found out.

When questioned, Yoxall confessed.

He said he did it for the money, court papers show. He also said he was sorry.

Before he was sentenced, he told his life story to an officer charged with determining what his punishment should be.

Yoxall told the officer that he had a childhood marked with physical and verbal abuse, records show. He has a knot on his forehead, the result of being thrown against a piece of furniture, he said.

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He started drinking at 12, according to court records. He started smoking marijuana at 11. He added LSD and mushrooms by 14.

He was diagnosed as bipolar and spent time in a mental facility in his junior year of high school while battling depression. Part of his tailspin was the loss of three close friends that year, two to accidents and one to suicide.

For Yoxall, his three months in the “loony bin,” as he described it, marked the first time he felt calm. He was free from what he considered the chaos at home.

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Yoxall moved out of his house at 17, lying on a lease application to get his own apartment.

He told the details of his childhood to the probation officer who filled it out in the requisite forms. The officer wrote that Yoxall felt "ashamed and humiliated" and that the thought of the crime made Yoxall feel "sick all the way down to the pit of his stomach."

The report recommended probation. The judge granted it in January 2001.

As a condition, Yoxall was not allowed to own a firearm.

The images of a life

Yoxall got his first tattoo at age 17 — something small, stupid and easily hidden under clothes, he said. As the years passed, the ink creations became larger, more elaborate and more meaningful.

At 24, Yoxall had etched into his right arm the character Winnie the Pooh as depicted in the Disney cartoons, but wearing a blindfold, cigarette in his mouth, and crucified. Blood from the nail hole in his paw was dripping into a jar marked “Hunny."

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To Yoxall, it was a memorial to the loss of innocence. He had just lost a friend to a car wreck. And he thought about friends he lost as a teenager to suicide and other car wrecks.

It is a tattoo that might startle people, but on Yoxall's arm it blends in with so many others.

Yoxall's collection of tattoos are along his arms, chest and back. He had letters tattooed on the knuckles of his hands that read “Forsaken.”

He had smaller letters placed vertically on the middle sections of his fingers. When interlaced, the letters spelled “Assassin.”

Yoxall also stretched holes in his ear lobes with gauges. He started with a tunnel three-eighths of an inch in diameter, among the largest available at the time, he said.

He also had small barbells placed through the skin in his back, near the nape of his neck. He said he was among the first in the city to get the body modification jewelry.

Yoxall took the gauges out of his ears three years ago. But the holes were so wide, his ear lobe will never grow back together.

He always will have a slit in each ear.

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Yoxall doesn’t mind. Even though he is not that person anymore, he can’t deny he was at one time. And he is all right showing it.

He feels the same about his tattoos. He touches up old ones and adds new ones to some of the remaining bare skin on his body.

Most recently, he had one added to the top of his foot.

For Yoxall, his tattoos reveal his level of commitment and conviction. He took one step of commitment when he extended his tattoos below his sleeve. Then, he added the one on his neck.

“When I got my throat tattooed, everybody looked at me differently,” he said.

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It is an illustration of an open straight razor, making a V-shape across his throat. There are small blood drops by the blade.

It called attention to himself. It invited derision.

It also brought Yoxall into a community of like-minded individuals who enjoyed decorating their bodies. At 19, Yoxall had stopped drinking, for the most part, and had stopped doing drugs.

He had done so much of each that the appeal of each was gone. Among his friends, he was often the designated driver.

'You know if they mean business'

He also was the designated enforcer.

“I had the reputation for taking care of people’s dirty laundry for them,” Yoxall said. “That’s a reason why people associated with me.”

Yoxall had been a brawler since high school. Typically, he was part of a fight at the beginning of the year.

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After time passed, and Yoxall surmised that people forgot about the brutality of the first beating, someone would challenge him at the end of the year.

Those fights continued into adulthood. Yoxall was often challenged and was not one to back down.

At times, the confrontations escalated.

Four times, someone at a party pulled a gun on him, Yoxall said. Each time, he could tell by looking at the man’s eyes that he was using the gun as a tool to threaten and that the man didn’t actually to pull the trigger.

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"You know if they mean business or not," he said.

Yoxall was able to talk his way out of each situation. He recalled one time vividly where he calmly explained the consequences of the action and told the person he didn't want that outcome.

Yoxall said being in those rough situations helped him remain calm when faced with the situation on the freeway. Those scared, irresponsible gun owners would help steel him for the time when he would save a trooper’s life.

Finding a community

When he turned 30 in February 2003, Yoxall took stock of himself. He was a journeyman plumber, a college dropout, a convicted felon and a tough guy whom friends liked because he was an intimidating enforcer.

He was also a married father of two children who were becoming old enough to be aware of the man he was.  

Yoxall decided to make some changes.

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“It’s not the legacy I wanted to leave for my kids,” he said. Yoxall stopped hanging out with those old friends and worked on adopting new habits.

He volunteered at his kids’ school. He started working with developmentally disabled children.

Mostly, he decided to stop carrying around the anger over his childhood.

“At some point, you wake up and decide (that) this isn’t going to control my life anymore,” he said. “I need to leave those stones at the door. This is not who I wanted to be.”

Yoxall had been released from probation the previous month, one year earlier than his sentence, on his probation officer's recommendation.

In August 2003, Yoxall asked that his felony conviction be erased and turned into a misdemeanor. He also asked for his gun back.

The judge granted both requests.

That same year, at a shooting range, a man came up to him and started talking tattoos. The two hit it off.

The man was ex-military and owned a shooting range. Soon, Yoxall was out shooting with the man and his friends, a mix of law enforcement and current or former military personnel.

“We were enjoying ourselves, but we were also there to hone our skills and to learn from one another,” he said.

They ran barricade drills, trying to hit targets while ducking behind an object. They practiced the one-hole drill, trying to group shots on a target as closely as possible so they made one large hole. They practiced while wearing “plate carriers,” a body armor vest.

They practiced in some hills near Lake Pleasant in Peoria, Ariz.

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For Yoxall, it was a professional spin on the shooting he did on his own starting in the late 1990s. He was not content to set up bottles and cans in the desert and fire away.

He tried to do tactical training on his own.

One of the spots where he practiced his shooting was on a patch of desert just off Interstate 10, west of Phoenix.

On the side of the road

On Jan. 12, Yoxall and his girlfriend, Heidi Jones, were driving to Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., where she was going to run a 10K race. As they left Phoenix, they saw the Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper enter westbound I-10 from the on-ramp at Arizona 85. 

Yoxall was doing 82 mph and said something along the lines of what an awful start to the day it would be to get a speeding ticket.

But the trooper kept going, distancing himself from their silver Toyota Tacoma truck, Yoxall said.

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They caught up with him a few miles ahead and saw that the trooper had pulled to the side of the freeway. Yoxall slowed as he saw the flares on the road.

It was dark and Yoxall said he didn’t want to run over a flare or whatever other debris might be on the road.

Then he looked over and saw what was happening.

“Call 911,” he said to his girlfriend.

After he passed the scene, he sped up, then parked on the shoulder. “I wanted distance between the situation and me,” he said.

What happened next occurred within 10 seconds, Yoxall estimated. But to him, it played out much more slowly.

He saw a woman's body on the side of the freeway. Not a threat, he remembered thinking.

The lights from the cruiser were blinding him, so he adjusted his approach slightly. He saw the trooper had his gun holstered.

He saw another gun in the road. The slide was locked back.

Yoxall surmised it was out of bullets. Also, not a threat.

The trooper was on the ground, bloodied. His attacker was straddling him and raining punches.

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Yoxall said it looked like a mixed martial-arts brawl.

“The guy’s on top of him in full mount, like a UFC fighter,” Yoxall said.

Yoxall yelled a question: “Do you need assistance?”

The answer seemed obvious. But Yoxall said it was a “trained response to a situation.”

The trooper, identified later as Ed Andersson, replied, “Help me.” The attacker yelled at Andersson to shut up.

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Yoxall approached, his Springfield XD9 9 mm in his hand, and moved his position, giving himself a clear line of fire. He saw the attacker look at him.

Yoxall said the attacker's face showed pure evil.

“He raises his arms up again to pummel him,” Yoxall said.

That's when Yoxall squeezed the trigger. “Pop, pop, pop.”

His third shot hit the man's head, killing him. 

Yoxall knelt over the injured trooper.

“My name is Thomas,” he told him. “I’m here to help.”

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Another motorist stopped and used the radio to call in the incident. Within minutes, Department of Public Safety cars swarmed the area.

To Yoxall, the wait seemed longer.

As troopers approached, Yoxall placed his handgun on the ground.

Yoxall told troopers he was the shooter. He directed them to the gun he used.

He wore a hoodie and shorts and felt cold in the January air. Troopers separated him and his girlfriend.

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His immediate thought was of her: Was she OK? The thought would continue haunting him in the coming days, his only regret about the incident.

“I didn’t give her a choice to participate in that,” Yoxall said, tearing up at the thought.

The trooper was taken to a hospital. He would survive his injuries, which included a gunshot to the shoulder.

A trooper who knew Andersson came up to Yoxall, called him a hero and thanked him. Yoxall demurred.

He said he just wanted to give his statement and be on his way.

This happened

Yoxall was driven to a substation about 25 miles away in Buckeye, Ariz., and interviewed. He wished he had brought along the coffee he left in his truck.

He also left behind his chewing tobacco, but fished through his cargo shorts and found another tin tucked away.

As the public-safety detective asked him about the incident, Yoxall said he became emotional about it for the first time.

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He shed tears as he described Andersson being beaten on the side of the road, he said.

“What had to be going through his mind, along on the highway?” he said. “ 'Nobody’s coming for me. I’m dead.' ”

Afterward, the man who interviewed him told Yoxall, in so many words, that he wouldn’t face charges, Yoxall said. He bought lunch and was driven back to the scene.

By the time he got back there, word had spread among the troopers about what happened.

“Once that genie was out of the bottle, everyone else was coming up and thanking me,” Yoxall said. “It was awkward.”

Yoxall was allowed to drive away. The couple resumed their drive to California. No radio; little talking.

Somewhere down the road, Yoxall realized what happened.

“You ended somebody’s life today,” he remembered thinking. His mind also kept replaying the incident — not everything, just the final moment, just the sight of the man’s head being torn apart.

“Jesus, that image from that last shot,” Yoxall said.

Yoxall wouldn’t recall the whole incident until weeks later. His brain would replay the scene bit by bit, each time backing it up by a few seconds.

“It’s not like you’re filling in the blanks; there’s no blanks,” he said. “But your mind lets you see more of the picture until you see the whole darn thing.”

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The two checked into a hotel. Yoxall took a shower. His girlfriend turned on the news.

The scene they had left behind in Arizona hours earlier was now the subject of nationwide news coverage.  

When Yoxall emerged, she called him to the TV.

“Coast to coast,” Yoxall thought.

It started sinking in. This happened. That quick decision while driving down a freeway between Tonopah and Quartzsite would change Yoxall’s life forever.

Suddenly, in the spotlight's glare

Yoxall would have preferred not to hold the news conference, would have preferred to remain anonymous and not stand in front of a bank of television cameras and face questions from reporters.

The Arizona Department of Public Service had arranged for Yoxall to speak with the psychologist who deals with troopers and other law-enforcement officers who have gone through traumatic situations. Yoxall said that help made it easier for him to digest the situation.

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Yoxall also had nearly daily calls from the agency director. He received invitations for private meetings with units from other police departments.

He was taken quietly to the state Capitol building where he met the governor and legislative leaders. Most important, he had also met the trooper whose life he saved.

But he had mostly retained his anonymity.

That wouldn’t last, the state officials told him. His name was part of a public document and would be released at some point.

Best to get in front of it rather than have every media outlet in the city, state and country chasing him down, the staff advised him.

Yoxall agreed. He met the media in a conference room near the Department of Public Safety headquarters. Yoxall stood at the podium, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of his favorite camera brand, Leica.

He was visibly shaking. He sounded nervous.

He read from a statement. He talked about how awful it was to take a life, how glad he was to know the trooper was alive and that his family would get to enjoy the days and years ahead.

Someone asked him about the “hero” tag.

“I’m an ordinary person,” he said. “I was put in extraordinary circumstances. I may have acted heroically. I don’t consider myself a hero.”

Yoxall told reporters he felt that carrying his firearm was a right and he also felt he had a responsibility to train with it.

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“I have taken the time to make sure, several times a year, to go out and practice those safety techniques to make sure I’m always responsible.”

Yoxall knows his has become a singular story that illustrates the “good guy with a gun” scenario. His story shows the notion of an armed citizen preventing a tragedy is not the stuff of fantasy.

A few times a year, a citizen will kill a stranger in a homicide that police rule is justified. It has happened 8.5 times a year in Arizona during the decade from 2004 to 2014, according to statistics reported to the FBI.

A sampling of those shooting reports show they involve people protecting themselves or their property. People saving someone else is rare, saving an officer almost unheard of.

Yoxall hinted, without getting specific, that political operatives who wish to use his story to advance a gun-rights agenda have approached him.

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"I could have totally milked it if I wanted," he said. "Get yourself on the cover of the (National Rifle Association's) quarterly magazine." 

But there was one hitch: Yoxall believes gun ownership should have restrictions.

He believes potential gun owners should be subject to background checks. He also thinks the government should mandate training for anyone who wishes to carry any type of weapon, handgun or long gun.

“You have to hold yourself to a higher standard, to be a responsible citizen,” he said.

Firearms are tools and Yoxall said people need to be well versed in how they operate before they attempt to use them in a dangerous and stressful situation. Untrained people run the risk of shooting an innocent person or being frozen with fear and having their gun taken away from them.

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“You have to show me you’re proficient if I’m going to let you carry those weapons,” Yoxall said.

Yoxall said he doesn’t think his thoughts are unique.

“I believe most educated common-sense gun owners feel the same way, too,” he said. “There’s a lot of us out there. But they don’t have that voice.”

What if he'd strayed?

Through the months, Yoxall has found peace with the incident.

He asked his pastor if it was wrong not to feel guilty for shooting a man dead.

“I can’t get over the fact I have no remorse for taking that person’s life,” Yoxall said. “For some reason, I thought I was going to get a demerit from Jesus.”

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He said his pastor told him remorse came from questioning our actions. The pastor told him that his action was justified, that he was stopping evil.

Yoxall said his psychiatrist has told him much the same.

Yoxall also met Andersson, the trooper whose life he saved.

“That’s when the healing really started to move forward exponentially,” Yoxall said. “There was that validation that what I did was just and true.”

They first met at a Peoria substation. Since then, they have had occasional Sunday lunches after church services.

Andersson said the two have become "real close friends."

Andersson, who had become a grandfather for the second time two weeks before the shooting, said he had been in perilous, isolated situations before while patrolling freeways for more than two decades.

He was grateful Yoxall drove by when he did during this one. Andersson said he had a surgery last week and his face still showed signs of the January trauma. 

While Yoxall can wax philosophically about the shooting, Andersson took a pragmatic approach.

"For me, he was there that one day, those few seconds, those few minutes," he said. "And that's good."

As Yoxall has digested the events, he has come to believe everything that happened in his past — the abuse, the fights, the arrest — played a part in getting him to that exact spot of Interstate 10 on that January morning.

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He also knows he had several opportunities to stray from that path.

• What if he fought the theft charge and ended up in jail?
• Or if he had engaged in a gun battle with any of the four people who had threatened him at parties?
• Or if he had fouled up on probation and couldn't get his gun back?

He also had altered the path ahead for Andersson, who now had his timeline extended, and for himself.

“Even though mine wasn’t going to end, was mine still destined to go this way?” he said. “Mine’s taken a different course than what was initially there.”

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Part of that was of Yoxall's own doing.

The week after his news conference, he quit his job as a plumber. He decided to turn his photography hobby into a business.

He’s calling his company, cheekily, Sure Shot Photography.

It was a byproduct of the empowerment Yoxall felt after the incident. 

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“It was vindicating,” he said. “Not only did I stand upon my convictions that morning, I was able to act on them. That says something to me. I have that heart, that determination, that grit.”

The past few months have put Yoxall in settings he otherwise wouldn't be. This past Saturday, he was in Prescott, Ariz., speaking to a group of law-enforcement retirees. Two Saturdays before that, he was at a Scottsdale, Ariz., golf course for a Department of Public Safety tournament.

The week before that, he was in New York where a national police group was honoring him. Afterward, officers circled him and got him to down a shot of Jameson whiskey with them.

Finally moving on

On Monday, Yoxall and Andersson received medals of valor from Director Frank Milstead at the annual Arizona Department of Public Safety awards ceremony. Afterward, Yoxall was going to a substation where he was going to take his first in a series of ride-alongs with troopers.

Yoxall planned to make a photo project out of it.

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Milstead, speaking before the ceremony, said he was glad to see Yoxall embracing the law-enforcement community, just as it has embraced him.

"I just hope, somewhere down the road, outside of these mementos we've given to him these past few months, we can do more for him and his family," Milstead said. "He's just a solid community member and a great supporter of law enforcement."

The department did help arrange for Yoxall to get two gifts.

One was a license plate frame that reads "KOA." It refers to the historic radio frequency that Phoenix police used and only law-enforcement officers can purchase them.

Yoxall said the police union representative who gave it to him joked it might get him out of a traffic ticket or two.

The other was a handgun. His was taken away because it had become evidence in a homicide investigation.

Milstead made a call and another union representative presented Yoxall with a Glock.

On Saturday, Yoxall received a letter from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office officially informing him he would not face charges in the shooting. It was ruled justified.

A detective called him Tuesday and said they would set up a time to get his weapon back.

Yoxall does not plan to keep it. Part of the reason is that he has become a Glock aficionado, preferring it to the Springfield he used in the shooting. But he also carries no sentimentality for the object.

"That's not a memento I care to have," he said.

When he gets it, Yoxall plans to take the weapon to his gun store and sell it for store credit.

Follow Richard Ruelas on Twitter: @ruelaswritings