Sheriff Mike Neal — The Walmart Shooting and What He Brought Home | Part 2

He rammed his truck into a van full of cop killers at 55 miles per hour. His first thought after the shooting was that he'd be fired.

Part 2 picks up exactly where Part 1 ended — Michael Neal, rifle on his lap, driving over an hour with his foot to the floor toward West Memphis. (Part 1 linked below.)

He stopped to refuel at a gas station at Mile Marker 275 — the same exit as the crime scene. He didn't know that. He pulled onto the overpass, looked down on the two officers lying in the road, and decided what he was going to do. What happened next took about seven seconds and ended a two-hour manhunt.

Neal walks through the full shooting: the communication breakdown that let the killers hide in a Walmart parking lot for two hours, the moment gunfire started as he turned into the lot, the decision to ram rather than engage at a distance, and taking 12 rounds of AK fire through his windshield while firing 30 rounds of .223 back through it. His first thought walking up on scene was that he was going to jail for shooting two people in a parking lot in broad daylight. His second was that everybody was looking at him. Not with anger — with something else entirely.

The episode closes with why he stayed in law enforcement after all of it, and what he wants people to take away from seeing the names of Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

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🔗 Part 1: https://youtu.be/ih4BCxgG6DU

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Chapters:

0:00 — Cold Open: Bobby Paudert Hugs the Man Who Ended It
0:25 — The Anniversary Wedding, Revisited
3:50 — The Call Goes Out: Two Officers Down
6:32 — "I Was Used as an Instrument"
9:49 — "This Is Real. Get Your Mind Right."
13:16 — The Communication Breakdown That Let the Killers Hide
16:57 — The Walmart Lot: Gunfire, the Ram, the Shots
21:12 — What He Brought Home — and Why He Stayed

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Keywords:
West Memphis ambush 2010, Walmart cop killer shooting, vehicle ram police, officer-involved shooting story, sovereign citizen attack, wildlife officer hero, Brandon Paudert Bill Evans, cop killer stopped, Mile Marker 275, Arkansas wildlife officer, police windshield shooting, law enforcement communication breakdown

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"Heroes Live Forever" - the story of Kansas City (MO) Police Officer Thomas R. Meyers