Untitled - November 2, 2026

00:00:00 Captain Dallas Greer: Welcome to Trooper talk. I'm Captain Dallas Greer. This is where we go beyond the flashing lights and headlines to talk about the people behind the badge. Every trooper has a story why they chose this career, what keeps them going, and what service really looks like on the toughest days. Here we will have real conversations about public safety, community, and the human side of law enforcement. So we're glad you're here with us today. We're sitting down with investigator Michael Rigdon with the Kentucky State Police investigator Clayton Roberts with the Kentucky State Police commander, Matthew Greathouse, with the Lexington Police Department and senior special agent Bomb Tech, Ryan Caudill with the ATF. Thank you all for joining us today as we discuss the second largest seizure of illegal homemade explosives in the history of the ATF. So welcome to the Trooper Talk podcast. I'll be your special guest host today. Captain Dallas Greer with the Kentucky State Police Special Operations Branch. Just a brief introduction of myself. I am the current commander of our Special Operations branch. For those that don't know what that is, that is the branch of the Kentucky State Police that houses our Special Response team, which the simple way to describe that is our state police SWAT team, our canines. So all of our canines across the state explosive dogs, patrol dogs, narcotic detection dogs, any canine that you see with the state police out in the field that comes out of our office and then our hazardous devices unit, which is who we're here to talk about today. And again, kind of the simplistic way to describe that is it's the state police bomb squad, and we're going to let these guys go into a little bit more detail about what they do. But with that said, we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about our hazardous devices unit and some of our partners that we work with. So we'll introduce them before we dive into this. I will say too, this is a very, I think, an interesting going to be a unique episode, a little different than what Trooper talk has done in the past. This is our first case investigation that's essentially going to be a debrief of that case and kind of all the ins and outs of how that occurred. So I think you're in for a special treat. I know, I'm very excited. I appreciate all the guys that came out today to make this happen. And I think it's going to be really good. So with that being said, let's kind of go around the table. We've got more than just one. We've got four guests here today, and I'll start with my guys, with our KSP guys, and then we'll go to our Lexington and ATF counterparts. Mike, you wanna introduce yourself?

00:02:24 Michael Rigdon: Yeah. So I'm Investigator Michael Rigdon, I'm the supervisor over KSP HQ. I've been in law enforcement for twenty years now. Um, I started with the Paducah Police Department, but I've got sixteen years in, um, bomb squad experience.

00:02:40 Clayton Roberts: I'm Clayton Roberts. I started my law enforcement career with Lexington police, uh, working with Matt here. I've got twenty nine years in law enforcement and twenty five of that in hazardous devices bomb work.

00:02:51 Captain Dallas Greer: Ryan.

00:02:52 Ryan Caudill: Ryan. Caudill I'm a special agent with ATF. Um, I've started my career in two thousand and four in Detroit, Michigan. And in oh nine I got shipped back here to Kentucky. I was born and raised here in Kentucky, and I'm probably the youngest one on the panel here. But, uh, for, uh, as far as experience with bombs, I just graduated the, uh, in, uh, twenty twenty.

00:03:15 Matthew Greathouse: Uh, Matthew Greathouse with Lexington police department. I'm the commander of our hazardous devices unit. Uh, Clayton and I came on our bomb squad at the same time in two thousand and one, so that makes us fairly old. Um, and you made me feel really, really old when you said there's one hundred and twenty years worth of bomb experience in here. That's a that's a lot. So we started.

00:03:32 Clayton Roberts: And he's got.

00:03:33 Ryan Caudill: He's got half.

00:03:33 Matthew Greathouse: Of it. So I was gonna say that twenty five of that is mine, uh, as being a bomb tech.

00:03:38 Captain Dallas Greer: So yeah, so a lot of this guys, I'm just some of this introductory stuff I think I'm going to put out to the panel. So again, for our listening audience that doesn't know, you know, they've heard hazardous devices unit, bomb squad, bomb tech. Um, and I think there's a, a understanding out there in the general public of what that is like most of what we do in special operations that comes from mass media. Right. It's coming from movies like The Hurt Locker or movies about bomb techs and that kind of thing. With that being said, I really want you guys to kind of explain what it is you just kind of do on a day to day basis before we dive into the incident. So I'll just put it out to the panel and you guys can kind of talk about it. So with that being said, what is a hazardous devices unit? What is a bomb technician?

00:04:20 Matthew Greathouse: Can somebody I'll speak on at least part my part and then I'll pass it over to Mike, because you all are the only full time squad in the state. So there's five bomb or bomb squads in the state of Kentucky. Um, I'll have to be accredited through the FBI. The unique thing about being a bomb tech in the United States is we all go through the exact same school. It's in Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It's been there since the nineteen seventies. And everybody, like I said, has to go. So we're all trained to the exact same, um, common denominator. So anybody anywhere in the United States can go to anybody else's squad. We're all going to have the same equipment for the most part. Few different vendors may have a few small different things, but we're going to know how to operate those equipment. So we could run a call really anywhere in the United States. The other really unique thing about being a bomb tech is there's really not a lot of us in the United States and all the territories, less than three thousand really is what the kind of running number is. Twenty twenty pushed a lot of experience out. As we talked about, there's one hundred plus years here that a lot of those places lost those in a week from their squad. So I think it's pretty cool because if we need any information, we don't know what's something we've never seen before. Somebody else has seen it. And I always equate it. I can make two phone calls and I've got the answer, no matter where and who I have to call. And I think we're going to talk about that. We have lines in the laboratories that will answer the phone twenty four over seven, and somebody will help us out. So that's that's kind of the unique part about us. We're in Lexington, we're part time, so all of us have different assignments. My full time assignment is a special investigations commander. So I oversee narcotics and other backgrounds and a bunch of different things. and being a bomb tech is my part time job. So and that's what all the other agencies in the state have, except for you all. You are unique and you actually have full time guys.

00:06:06 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah. And I think just so again, just to make sure that the listening audience understands when we're saying part time, um, you know, I would, I would hesitate to even call it that. I would say collateral duty. Uh, because again, the training, the training standards are the same. Yeah. Uh, you're having to meet all those training standards. Is that correct?

00:06:23 Matthew Greathouse: Yep. So we have to train, uh, minimum of, I don't know, the hours we train three days a week. So that's thirty hours. Uh, I'm thirty hours a month. Sorry. So we train a lot. Yeah. Plus a forty hour in-service every year. I equate it, and I say this out to everybody is we're the most full time part time unit within the agency is we are just, it seems every week we have to do something, whether it be a demonstration or a protective sweep or something. I stand by and it really that's dictated on what goes on around the world too. And, and in the United States, it depends on what's in the news, what's going on changes. It ebbs and flows. We could answer ten calls in a week, and then we could go four months and not do anything. It just really kind of depends. Right now we're getting into our busy season, which is in the fall, and we've seen an uptick in what we respond to and how many times we're getting called out.

00:07:12 Captain Dallas Greer: Okay. So for for our agency, for KSP, Mike or Clayton, could you kind of give an idea of, of what, what that looks like? And again, maybe kind of a, you know, what an average day for an HD investigator looks like.

00:07:24 Clayton Roberts: So, uh, as Matt said, all of us are trained, have similar training, but the, the variety of calls is, is different. So with the city agencies, they run more suspicious package calls. So people see something on a street corner and they, they call in and they do more protective sweeps and that sort of thing where we're a state agency, we're we're more rural. So we get more recoveries. We do more commercial explosives, more military explosives, uh, because we're so spread out a lot of times by the time a suspicious package gets called in, by the time we show up. A local has decided to open it on their own. Right? So we don't we don't run as many of those types of calls, but the agencies all compliment each other. State police are. Our bomb squad was formed in eighty four. Lexington had a team in the seventies, but it sort of dissolved and then came back again in two thousand and one when Matt and I started. Uh, but the partnerships between those agencies has been strong all the way through that time. And so I think as we get into today, into the, the nuts and bolts of this incident case, it really shows how those partnerships with not just the local agencies. Matt mentioned the five local squads in Kentucky, but also we've got two federal partners with the FBI and the ATF with bomb squads. Uh, and so there's seven plus the military we work with. So there's eight different entities that work very closely together. We all handle our own business, but then we come together on these big incidents. So I think you'll see that today. Um, so really that's, I think that's important for the viewers to understand is like the cohesiveness of the, of the the different teams.

00:08:55 Matthew Greathouse: Yeah, this is definitely not the first time I remember we started. It seemed we went everywhere the state police went. The state police would come and do just about everything we do. And that's what we've continued to see over the twenty five years. ATF Ryan came back. You said in oh nine. Is that right? Yes, sir. As a SES with certified explosive specialist, which I won't take that thunder from you, but we rely heavily on those guys. So our I think we're extremely unique in the state of Kentucky. There's a lot of places where a lot of squads don't get along, or they're territorial, or the federal agencies don't work together either by themselves. And then with us, we don't have that here. Um, it is we have a call. We all go, uh, you all have something that's out in the middle of the state and you don't have enough people. Another thing to go run a call as a bomb tech, you have to have at least two bomb techs that are there certified. So you all only have four. We have eight. We share those numbers across. So it's like, hey, can you send me a couple guys? Yes, absolutely. And we talked about the turnover with a couple other agencies. I've seen that in my squad. I'm the only one left from when we formed. And I've got a lot of experience. My next experience guys got like three years on. That's not a lot of time. And so the good thing is, is we can still lean on senior techs with either the federal agency or the state and send my guys to get experience, not to take over, but just can they just go and learn and be a part of it, which is extremely beneficial. And I know there's a lot of places that don't have this, and I would venture to say they're probably pretty envious of the fact that we get along very well here.

00:10:20 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah, yeah, I know, as I know, as the Special Operations branch commander, when I, when I promoted and took that position, having never been a bomb tech, knowing very little about explosives, you know, obviously having these guys who, who I again, say are subject matter experts to lean on, but then to see the relationships I've gotten to see over the last four or five years in this position, how you guys work together. And it makes my job extremely easy, right? Like I just get to say, hey, here's where the problem is go. And, and then I don't have to worry about it anymore. So, um, yeah, I've seen that firsthand. Ryan, tell us a little bit about the ATF and how that you know what the bomb tech and bomb squad community looks like for you guys.

00:10:58 Ryan Caudill: Okay. There's only fifty five of us in the nation. So, uh, I'm not unlike a squad like these guys have or or you guys have. I'm a one man, you know, show. Everything's in my truck, so if I need help, I have to call one of these guys. I can't, I can't really do it by myself. So, uh, and vice versa, they call me. I'm willing to come out whenever they want me to come out and help whenever I can. I've been here. I cover all of the state of Kentucky, so it just takes me a while to get there, you know? But I mean, I was in Paducah. I go to Paducah and then come back and go to Ashland. And my closest counterpart is in Charleston, West Virginia. Um, we have one in Cincinnati as well, but these guys are right here beside me, so I lean on them a lot to help me out. And another main thing, I guess, I don't know if you guys are going to get into it, but there's really and you guys can talk more about it. There's really not any state laws when it comes to explosives. You know, as far as getting someone prosecuted for it. So I'm not saying they have to lean on us, but federally, if you want something prosecuted, you really got to kind of call one of us, either us or the FBI. Doesn't matter.

00:12:03 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah, yeah. And I know that's a big that was one of the things that these guys expressed to me when when I became the special ops commander, something that I know we're working on right now, I think within the bomb community in the state as a whole and as our part of our agency, trying to trying to help lead that charge in some way. Uh, just one other introductory thing before we start talking about the incident that I wanted you guys to talk about that I thought is really unique to get to see is how well and how much you guys train together. You know, I came out of this came out of the academy in two thousand and eight. Uh, did my road time at post nine in Pikeville. And then for a little bit post ten, Harlan and I came to special ops as a special response team trooper and, uh, have spent the last sixteen years here. Um, saw a lot with SRT and with our K-9, not as much with HDU. Of course, that's changed over time. How much more now that all those elements kind of work together on multiple calls, it's it's almost every call we go on anymore is a, it's not just an SRT call or an H2 car canine call. It's all three units working together. But with that being said, uh, you know, didn't really have a good understanding of that. And then to get to see it as the commander and to see, you know, that cooperation that you guys have talked about and alluded to quite a bit, that doesn't just happen on game day, right? You guys are doing that, uh, in training year round.

00:13:19 Matthew Greathouse: Yeah. Two really good trainings this year, uh, that were federally funded. Um, and we worked together as a, as a cohort, I guess, if you will, to make sure we get the biggest bang for the buck as the bomb community within the state of Kentucky. And you all are gracious enough to let us use Trooper Island, which is a fantastic place. It's a it's number one. It's beautiful. Number two, it's a very, very, very captive audience. You can't go anywhere at night. And you're, you're there at thirty one acres or whatever it is, and you can't escape, which is good because we get to keep your attention.

00:13:47 Captain Dallas Greer: Well, you could, but you'd have you'd have to swim a little bit.

00:13:50 Speaker 6: Yeah. Yes.

00:13:51 Matthew Greathouse: Um, we can't get all of our equipment necessarily over to the island like you all can because most of your stuff is in a truck. So one, one gleaning example is for this year we had one of our response trucks. We also, I think we had two or three teams. Um, and you, one of your guys just gave them the truck, said, here you go. I've seen other places where it's very closed, um, close fisted where that's my stuff you can't use or I need to watch you. It's like and same thing for me. Your guys show up on my trainings almost every week, um, that we train and same thing for the ATF when they're available. I don't have any specific locks on any of my trucks and my equipment is everybody else's equipment. And I know that that's the exact same way with you all. We it's really hand in glove, uh, for this, for, for our bomb community and our state. Uh, we have a Breeders Cup coming up. I need a couple dogs, and your mike just sends me the number. I call your your K-9 sergeant. It's already worked out. It's done. It's like you don't need to be involved and it's all taken care of. And you guys are going to be there to help support us, which we greatly, greatly appreciate. Uh, same thing with the a t f I need something from them, but just the way we cooperate together is pretty phenomenal.

00:15:02 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah. And, and Clayton, if you will, you know, he mentioned Trooper Allen and the training that we host down there. Could you want to talk a little bit more about that?

00:15:09 Clayton Roberts: Yeah. So the, the training we talked a little bit about kind of what, what the bomb squads do, right. Suspicious packages and threats and IEDs. And we do get IEDs in Kentucky, a lot of people are like, well, why do you have a bomb squad? You don't get IEDs. We're not overrun with bombs. But, you know, across the state, we respond to multiple actual live devices every year because people do build mostly pipe bombs. But there have been some more sophisticated it takes a tremendous amount of training to be able to handle this wide variety. And honestly, when I started with the bomb squad, I had no idea, like I knew I was interested in it. It takes about two years from start to finish to get a bomb tech trained. From the time that somebody tries out and gets accepted onto a team If they're going to go through basic bomb training, they're going to go through advanced training, disposal training. Uh, we'll maybe talk about tactical bomb tech training where they do those same tasks, but in a, in a higher threat environment. So Matt mentioned three days a month, that's a minimum. That's plus a forty hour in-service. Plus there's two two week schools that we go through on a regular basis. We were able to, uh, historically, all the commanders have talked and said across the state, where do we lack, you know, so where we've had training in one area, maybe Lexington is missing that training or Paducah is missing that training. And so try to get some consensus of these are the topic areas that we need to see most. And then we would go out and seek out that training. And sometimes that training is in house say, hey, the state police is well versed in that. They're going to put on a training to to fix that. Or it's Lexington is able to do that. And they train sometimes it's we need to bring in outside training. And so then we start going and looking for funding because those are very expensive trainings. We've had an excellent relationship with the Department of Homeland Security with Kentucky for many years, where we called and said back in oh four oh six, we called and said, hey, we need training as a state. We need money to do that. What can you do? And they were super responsive and have remained so ever since then. Every every time we've asked, they've come forth and said, yes, we'll provide the money for that training. The island has worked out really well as a location to do that training. Kentucky State Police has hosted bomb training on the island, whether it was with an outside vendor or inside training for many years, and then for a lot of years, we would hand off and say, okay, next year, Lexington, you're going to coordinate the training, we're going to host the island, you do the training, and then we would rotate that around so that everybody got a share of that. And one of the benefits in doing that, Matt alluded to it on the island is building those personal relationships. The public expects us to operate at a high level and in the public's eye. All public safety should work together all the time, as they should. But the reality is, public safety agencies are made out of people, and people have good days and bad days. Well, if the first day I make a call and I haven't met Ryan before, for example, we're both stressed out because it's a high stress call and things get tense. If I don't have background, if I don't know Ryan, if I haven't had a chance to talk to Ryan in a less stressful environment, I might think Ryan is just a jerk, or his agency is just a bad agency and doesn't want to work well with people. If I've spent time flipping hamburgers with Ryan at the island or washing dishes for cleanup after breakfast, then I know Ryan. I know his heart. He's a good dude. He's having a bad day, or we're both stressed out. Or maybe I'm the one being a jerk, and it makes those scenes go so much better. And I've seen that time and time and time again throughout the years. But it's really those foundations get, get built in these, these trainings that we do and bring everybody together and get to know each other on a personal level.

00:18:41 Captain Dallas Greer: We're going to take a pause to hear a quick message. Don't go, because we'll be right back.

00:18:47 Speaker 7: You've said it before. This will only take a second. Just a quick glance. A fast reply. But on the road seconds don't wait for you. They decide everything. Who stops, who doesn't? Who makes it home. So next time your phone lights up. Ask yourself, is this distraction worth a ticket or even a life? Put the phone away or pay. Paid for by NHTSA.

00:19:15 Captain Dallas Greer: Thank you for listening. Back to the episode. You know, for me, if if if the folks listening don't get anything else from these introductions and just kind of talking about in general what you guys do, it's that we are very fortunate in the state of Kentucky to have the bomb community, the bomb techs, and the level of expertise and training and the cooperation and coordination that we have with you guys. Uh, again, it's something that makes my job as the special operations commander very easy. Right. I just again, I make the call to Mike And he coordinates with everybody else, and you guys go and take care of it. And and again, having that confidence in you all because of the, the level of training and, and education and stuff that you guys have done and how well you work together. So we're very fortunate in the state of Kentucky to have you guys, with that being said, anything anything else as far as introduction, you guys got that you want to talk about or no. Okay. So we'll we'll talk. Uh, again, we said this was a case investigation podcast. So this is going to be a little bit, uh, you know, a little unique from what we've done in the past. You know, here we talk about this incident, um, pretty significant incident in the state of Kentucky. Um, Ryan can probably speak to this. I would say nationwide. Uh, would that be accurate in saying that? Yes, sir. Incident that occurred on March twenty fifth, uh, in twenty twenty one, it spanned three days and occurred in Versailles, Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky. So just in the central part of the state. I'll let you, Ryan, I know you guys obviously are the lead investigating agency on this case, um, where it went federal with the ATF. Do you want to talk about just a little bit about the general, you know, what occurred and kind of how it started or whoever we put that out to whoever whoever wants to talk about.

00:20:55 Michael Rigdon: Ryan probably has the best overview, how it how it got started and got kicked off.

00:20:58 Ryan Caudill: Yeah. That's fine. Yeah, we were all there. So any really.

00:21:02 Matthew Greathouse: Actually one of our training days.

00:21:03 Ryan Caudill: Yeah. Matt. And then we're actually training.

00:21:05 Matthew Greathouse: Pouring down rain. Let's remember that it was pouring down rain that day.

00:21:08 Ryan Caudill: It was um, I think that to go go back a little bit the, the background on the gentleman that the, the suspect, um, he had had some previous stuff in his past, you know, he had been arrested, had a um disliking for, for the local police department. Uh, he saw them as the reason why he couldn't, um, you know, get a job. He was very talented. Uh, Mason, uh, you know, did a lot of stuff with rocks and bricks and stuff like that. Really talented gentleman, but, uh, they called him, um, arrested him, uh, I think a few months prior to this for, uh, he was asleep behind the wheel at a red light and the light was keep cycling and somebody called in and then they get there and he's under the influence. Uh, and so he gets arrested for that and, uh, gets a felony for it. And so ever since then, he was like, I hate, I hate the police, really. And so it started getting a little bit, um, worse. His behavior was getting a little bit out of hand, um, amongst his family members and stuff. So he had a family member that contacted the police department and said, hey, he's, he's kind of getting out of hand and, um, has assaulted me. So there was an active warrant for him, uh, for assault and strangulation. So goals, uh, kind of keep an eye on him. The day prior to March twenty fifth, a agency gets behind his vehicle, attempts to stop it, and he flees, and he's running, running, you know, all crazy off the road and everything else. That kind of let's let's call this off a little bit. Calm down. And then that the next day, the March twenty fifth, uh, Versailles PD gets wind that he's going toward UK hospital. And, uh, that's our only level one trauma center around here. Little did they know, his mother had been admitted to the hospital that night. Like, just, you know, wasn't she had a heart problem or something like that. So ambulance took her to UK. They didn't know that at the time. So they said, well, this is weird. This guy's getting a little bit off his rocker. He's going to go, he's doing something at the hospital. So then they contact over there, they contact the UK Police Department. They if you're not familiar with it, they got thousands of cameras there, you know, and they're state of the art cameras follow them through the hospital. And he's wearing like a security shirt says security on it. And it's bulky. It's real bulky underneath. So they make a decision. The chief over there does makes a decision to take, try and take him into custody. When he comes out of the hospital, they pretty much tackle him in the parking lot there, take him down, and then once they get in the vehicle, he's got, uh, I believe he had two firearms on him in the hospital. And the bulkiness, they didn't know it at the time, but he made, like, homemade body armor out of big steel plates and stuff. And, like, Captain America's shield on his arm. It's it's it's pretty crazy. You guys had to X-ray it, but it's pretty thick steel. And, uh, the people interviewing the people he worked with said it'd take him, like, forty five minutes at work when he got there in the morning to take all this armor stuff off. Because that's how paranoid he was at the police.

00:24:13 Captain Dallas Greer: So he wasn't just wearing he didn't just wear this to go to the hospital. He was wearing this stuff.

00:24:18 Ryan Caudill: Daily.

00:24:18 Captain Dallas Greer: Daily on a regular.

00:24:19 Ryan Caudill: Basis. Yeah. Because he thought like, hey, the people's coming after me to kill me. Mainly the police. So once they get him into custody, his father's in the vehicle and they find, uh, that's where they call. I think they called you.

00:24:32 Matthew Greathouse: Yeah, we got, we got a call from Ucpd and told them kind of what was going on, I think. Didn't we have some kind of, uh, knowledge prior to or I guess Versailles did that he may or may not have had dabbled a little bit in homemade explosives, or there was word from a family member.

00:24:46 Ryan Caudill: I think it was word. Yeah, but we didn't know for sure.

00:24:48 Matthew Greathouse: Part of some of the stuff they found in his vest was concerning. And that's where we get called. Yeah.

00:24:53 Clayton Roberts: Yeah. Joe called. The chief, called me direct and said, hey, we've got a bomb in a car over here. Yeah. And I thought it was interesting because.

00:24:59 Matthew Greathouse: Right at the front of the air.

00:25:00 Clayton Roberts: Yes. It wasn't a hey, we've got a suspicious package. It was we have a bomb here. And so we scrambled everybody to get over there. And he was right. We had multiple.

00:25:09 Matthew Greathouse: So it was pretty interesting that you're right in the middle of, uh, level one trauma center. And it that by itself is busy, but UK hospital, I think everybody's probably seen it. It's gigantic. It's huge. Yeah. Uh, one of the biggest employers in Fayette County is UK hospital. And there's people coming and going, uh, even when they took this guy down. And so now we've got a couple of concerns. We've got to be able to get this thing back open, but we also have to be able to mitigate and make sure we do it in a safe manner, all while it is pouring down rain. I mean, it just dumping buckets of rain in the middle of March. So.

00:25:42 Captain Dallas Greer: So what? So so we get to that point. What?

00:25:45 Matthew Greathouse: You start making a lot of phone calls.

00:25:47 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah. At this point the phone calls are everybody's phone's ringing. Kind of this is all hands on deck. Everybody's. Yeah.

00:25:52 Matthew Greathouse: And Clayton was with we, you know, he was with Lexington at that time. So I think we called you. Um, I don't know. You may. You weren't there. I don't think you were there. Uh, at our training day that day.

00:26:01 Ryan Caudill: Joe called me.

00:26:02 Matthew Greathouse: Yeah. Joe.

00:26:02 Michael Rigdon: So I think.

00:26:03 Matthew Greathouse: We just start making phone calls. Like we talked about cooperation, like, hey, we got something big going on. Not that Lexington. Once again, we can't handle it because we had enough people. We wanted more people, uh, wanted to bring everybody else we can because not only just the, the hands on deck experience backgrounds, uh, other trainings that people have been to, we've seen because it was like, this is, it's abnormal. It's not normal. We see this kind of behavior, especially at a, at a big facility.

00:26:27 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah. Well, and that's, of course, hindsight twenty twenty, you don't know at the time, but that becomes probably a pretty big piece to this puzzle because again, we said this thing started on the twenty fifth, but it goes for three days. So this turns into a pretty, pretty big incident, not just what's out there at the hospital.

00:26:41 Matthew Greathouse: And what we found out in the past through twenty some years of doing this. If we'd wait to call somebody, that's just hours. If you wait for us to get there, that's why we go do so many preemptive or standby assignments. Now is if something's found, a venue could be shut down for two to three hours before we even get there. Now, it's just better to have us there. And that's the same thing. We're not going to wait for four or five hours for us to go deal with this and then figure out, gosh, you know, it'd be really nice if we had a federal asset. Uh, let me call him. Oh, well, he's two hours away. Well, that's five hours into an incident. That's. We need to get this place open. We're going to call everybody. We we. Like I said, we communicate very well. It's just you call him, you call him and start getting all your people here and let's figure out what we got.

00:27:22 Captain Dallas Greer: So so we got an idea of how that looked like for Lexington. Of course. Clayton, you were with Lexington at the time. You said that, um, the chief with UK PD contacted you? Yes. Is that correct? Yeah. Um, how did you get the call, Mike? How did KSP get involved?

00:27:35 Michael Rigdon: So we either Matt or Clayton called me direct. Um, I think I was at the office at the time.

00:27:40 Matthew Greathouse: I think I called you because he was on the phone with them, and Joe was on the phone with Ryan, and I was on the phone with you.

00:27:45 Michael Rigdon: Yeah. So big incident. You know, I head straight that way. Get on scene. By the time I get there, Lexington's kind of doing their thing. They're shooting people up. They're going downrange to do X-rays. I'm like, where can I help you?

00:27:56 Matthew Greathouse: And part of that is we didn't we don't really know yet. We know because of this. We know this guy's got a tie to Versailles. I have no jurisdiction. Versailles. The Lexington Police Department doesn't. That's where the state police comes in. I may not need you as a bomb tech, but I need troopers. I need somebody that can do arrests, do warrants and things like that. And then as we talked about prosecution wise, we know the state of Kentucky is very laxed in those laws. And no matter what we get this guy with, he could be out very soon. So we need the federal assets to come in. And while they're there, they may not actually go hands on and do things, but we need them to tell us this is the way we're going to collect the evidence. These are the things we need to make sure we get a proper prosecution. So that's once again, we all throw our heads together and start talking. We know down the line we don't know what we're going to get to, but we have an idea that I don't think we all knew that it was going to take three days for sure. Uh, but but we wanted to make sure we had all of our ducks in a row as we're moving, uh, moving forward.

00:28:47 Clayton Roberts: And these are super dynamic scenes. So we got the initial call and we're scrambling. So we got, we're in training, so we have guys to go get the trucks and we have everybody else responding to the scene. I'm talking to our command staff. Matt was talking to Mike because I didn't know Mike had been called until he showed up on scene, which was awesome. But the first two guys that got on scene go downrange and start working because it's right outside the E.R. the hospital is effectively shut down. It can't be immediately evacuated.

00:29:12 Captain Dallas Greer: And let me just I don't mean to interrupt. Let me just stop right there. We say downrange, just so that folks, the kind of layman terms understand. What do you mean? And I think maybe you need to kind of probably need to talk a little bit about kind of how, how does these things, how does this evolve? Right? And kind of what are the procedures that take place to, to manage this thing?

00:29:28 Clayton Roberts: Sure. Well, we've got different levels of protection we can use and everything is we've got sort of a spectrum and public safety is number one. And bomb tech safety is number two and evidence collection. It just goes down, down the range. In an incident where there's life safety at risk, then we call that a cat a, and the guys are going to take more risk. They're going to use less personal protective equipment and they're going to take more risk where if there's if there's only property that's at risk, then we'll back up and use drones and robotics and other technology. And so we've got the whole gamut of, of capabilities. And you just have to select the right one for the right timings in this case, rather than waiting for the robots and the rest of the gear to show up, the first two responders put on a helmet and vest and then went down and started to investigate the car. So they didn't know. Like, how big a risk is this? How big are the device is that sort of thing.

00:30:15 Captain Dallas Greer: And of course, prior to that, I'm assuming what we would say kind of a perimeter has been set up of some sort. Evacuations have taken place.

00:30:21 Matthew Greathouse: And that's where that down range comes in.

00:30:24 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah.

00:30:24 Matthew Greathouse: Is what what immediately is around whatever threat we have. And then we need to back up far enough to make sure the public is back behind us and that we've got enough protection also, that if something did go, go wrong, because when you deal with a car issue and you think it's, you know, got a bomb in the car? Well, is that is it a Ryder truck or is it just a small.

00:30:42 Captain Dallas Greer: I mean, could it be Oklahoma? Could that be Oklahoma City or could that be. Yeah. Something less. Yeah.

00:30:46 Matthew Greathouse: So we have to use that as a threat assessment to tie back into one of the trainings we had this year. You have to use that threat assessment in your knowledge and start weighing all these things. And the goalposts move a lot. So that's the thing is we're not set in concrete. This is what we're doing. Well, okay, this changed. So now we got to go back and just completely reevaluate everything we're doing. And, and.

00:31:03 Clayton Roberts: Yeah. And so even, even even with our, our down range area, the hot zone, if you will, the area where the threat is the highest of even when that's established, it's not, it's still fluid. We still have people that popped out of doors that weren't secured and walked through the middle while the guys were down working on the devices. We still had civilians coming walking in later in the in the incident, after things were well established, we got a call and said, oh yeah, by the way, we took some devices off of his person and they're in a police car with him up the street, which is outside the area again next to another area of the hospital that was unsecured. So being able to ebb and ebb and flow. So as that as that progressed, information comes in and that's where the sales. The first time I was made aware of the Versailles Nexus, ATF was on scene, FBI was on scene, they contacted Versailles. They started to get a bigger idea of what's going on. And that's when I first became aware that this is going to go well outside of Lexington. So when Mike showed up, he pulled up, met me on the street. He said, what do you need? I was like, I need you in Versailles. Go like, figure out what's going on, figure out what we need. We're still working devices here. I have no idea. I think Ryan was already headed that way. So, Mike, just go meet up with Ryan, see what you got. Report back, let me know, and we'll get a game plan. Because in my eyes, at that point, we're handing this thing off to you all because we don't have jurisdiction there anyway.

00:32:25 Captain Dallas Greer: So essentially at this point you've got really two scenes. You've got the scene at at the University of Kentucky in front of the hospital at UK hospital. Um, and that's primarily Lexington Police Department that's handling that. And then you've got the scene that has kind of flowed over into Versailles, which is is the suspect's residence his home? And you've got ATF and KSP that are that are headed there to, to kind of start to skin that onion back. Okay. So let's, let's start kind of with, with University of Kentucky hospital and that scene.

00:33:00 Matthew Greathouse: We had a car in a bomb in a car. So our perimeter was really big to begin with. And we want to figure out is this do we need to keep it this way? Do we need to shut down all of Nicholasville Road? If anybody's been to Nicholasville Road on, I can't remember what day it was a Thursday in the morning you're going to shut down this road that's going to make a major impact. So that's not only impacting UK but it's going to impact the entire city. So we need to figure out what have we got. And and that's where those two original first responders go down for two bomb techs and very light gear to go see what they got. And we figured out, oh, wait, now, now we can start shrinking this down because it's not a huge device. We got a small couple devices, so we know from our training and experience that these devices can cause damage, but it's definitely not bringing down buildings and going to blow up cars like next to them. It's just going to do some internal damage. So that's where we started to shrink down. All the while I do want to shout out to now chief Rob young, that's in Versailles PD, retired ATF agencies that worked with Lexington for many, many, many years. So he does have an explosive background. So that's where a lot of this information was coming from. So we knew it was vetted. It wasn't like somebody just calling in and saying, we think this. We know for sure Rob knows what he's talking about. So when he says something, we, we know what we what we're going to have to send over there. So once we figured that part out, then it's also doing interviews of the suspect. We want to go talk to him to find out what kind of stuff maybe he was making, what he brought with him, why he was doing these things. Just the typical police stuff. It's that's no different than any officer or trooper out on the road. Just asking the the who, what, when, where, whys. And we hope to garner some kind of information out of that. I can't remember if he lawyered up then. I don't think.

00:34:33 Clayton Roberts: No. He was.

00:34:34 Matthew Greathouse: A little.

00:34:35 Clayton Roberts: Bit. He did. He spoke and some of some of the information he was giving us, we were like, that's not right. He said, well, I've got fifty pounds of anfo in the garage. We're like, okay, yeah. He's got, you know, a small.

00:34:45 Matthew Greathouse: Garage door.

00:34:45 Clayton Roberts: Opens, and then we open the garage and we find at least fifty pounds of.

00:34:49 Captain Dallas Greer: So what is that? What is anfo?

00:34:51 Clayton Roberts: It's just a it's a blasting agent. It's a he was making a homemade version of a of a commercial explosive. Oh, it's super easy to make. It's pretty common. You typically don't find it in those quantities outside of the blasting industry and mining and quarrying and things like that.

00:35:05 Matthew Greathouse: And not super sensitive. So I think that's something to point out too. This is something you could carry around in buckets. It's not going to be shock sensitive or something that's going to be you need to handle with kid gloves, I guess is the best way to say that.

00:35:15 Clayton Roberts: Very powerful, but not very it's not very sensitive.

00:35:17 Matthew Greathouse: Yeah. And UK had just got their command post. So going back to the scene they brand new. They rolled up. We didn't have ours there. They said we can provide it, which is great because as I said, it was raining. We needed to get in and at least have some place dry. We could talk to the techs that were going downrange and keep, you know, moving what we were doing. Um, and so part of what we have on our, our kit is X-ray equipment. Um, a lot of people, especially in the state of Kentucky, will understand what that means. When you talk about horses, vets use mobile, um, X-ray devices to go out and take X-rays of horses and things like that of animals. So we need to go down and see what's in these bags. That's the easiest way for us to go through and open it or not open it up, but take a picture of what's in there, interpret what we see and determine. Do we have an actual live device? What other mitigating things do we need to employ to make sure that that's then rendered safe? A lot of which was not. So we didn't have a lot of sophisticated things. We were able to rule those out pretty quick. So once again, we're starting to shrink now. We're shrinking our our footprint down a little bit to be cognizant of the fact that we're in a major city, we need to get the roadways back open. We have a level one trauma center. We don't need to evacuate people that you go back and do surgeries. There's just so many different things behind the scenes that bomb techs are going down doing bomb tech stuff. Clayton was the commander. I was the assistant commander at the time. And those are all the things we're thinking about that we need to think about. Those guys need to go down and do their job and make sure they're safe. Protecting the community. But we're looking at the overall thirty thousand foot view looking down like, okay, these little pieces, we need to start moving around and making sure we're being cognizant of that. And so we prosecuted that car probably in a couple hours, I guess, and figured out that it wasn't going to be super, super complicated. And I don't know, do we get a did you get a federal warrant for that? I know we we went through and did the bomb thing really, really quick on it, but I don't know if we did a state warrant or we did a, uh, a federal warrant, but I know, so now we're getting into prosecutions. We can't just go right into somebody's car, and we want to make sure we had all of our ducks in a row. So once the explosive part, it was mitigated and we didn't want to lose evidence. So we were able to cover things up and things like that because it was the rain. We wanted to make sure now we're starting to get back in. All right, now we need to slow the scene down. It's not a dynamic scene. Now. We need to start using our thinking brains and we need to do this. We need to do this because three years from now, when we go to trial, we want to make sure we've got all of our ducks in a row again. And so that's where things started to slow down because we didn't there wasn't a a threat to go take any weapons or anything else we saw on Plainview or that wasn't an explosive threat. So we're like, all right, let's freeze. Let's do our our due diligence. But now we can shrink down to just this parking lot area. Open Nicholasville Road back up. We just need to kind of have a space inside here. We can park all of our trucks and then wait for word on what was going on in Versailles and whether we need to do anything else with this guy in Lexington.

00:37:53 Captain Dallas Greer: And you said the car. So to prosecute that car to get it worked in that scene. So you said a couple hours.

00:37:58 Matthew Greathouse: I say a couple hours. Uh, and and that includes going through and then collecting all the evidence after warrants are written and things like that to make sure that we had everything that we needed. Uh, and then the vest he had on, he did have some homemade, um, fireworks I think he had in there and none was.

00:38:13 Clayton Roberts: Uh, he had a couple devices.

00:38:14 Matthew Greathouse: He had a couple devices. But I trying to say this, it's not sophisticated stuff you're gonna see in the movies. Yeah.

00:38:19 Captain Dallas Greer: So, so that was going to be my next question. You talked again. We said kind of two scenes at this point. University of Kentucky Hospital and his his residence. But really, in some ways, you kind of had a third scene there because you said the stuff that was taken off of him and he.

00:38:32 Clayton Roberts: Was in the.

00:38:33 Captain Dallas Greer: Car.

00:38:33 Matthew Greathouse: Correct.

00:38:33 Captain Dallas Greer: Yeah. That went yeah. What did that look like for you guys?

00:38:36 Clayton Roberts: So they I was back at the CP and, and it's just funny how things how they evolve again. You know, Matt was running his downrange crew and I was working the big picture dealing with the hospital staff. And you know, Matt mentioned evacuations. We had the, the aircraft landing pad for the hospital for level one. Trauma center was right directly over where we were. And it was later in the incident when somebody looked up and said, do you think we ought to close that? I was like, oh my goodness, how did we miss this? So we were able to to get with the hospital and let them use the one on the back. So we didn't shut down being able to bring in aircraft. We just closed down the one. So again, just sort of being flexible. But while I was there, one of the UK officers came up and said, hey, do you have somebody can come over to his car, you've got more devices. And I'm looking around and he's like, well, I guess it's me. Because everybody else was tasked downrange with with the car. So I grabbed one of the other guys and we walked over and we were able to, to deal with the items that were in the police car up the street and all the, all the items that he had were of the live devices. They were all of a type that we could deal with later. Like we could package them up, we could transport them, we can store them safely elsewhere. So we didn't have to do render safe procedures out there on the scene, which helped us timing wise and also be able to shrink our perimeter because we weren't taking actions on those. So that's how sort of those two scenes there. And in the meantime, we were getting feedback from Versailles of the challenges of getting either a state or federal search warrant for the residence. So we had enough to, to develop probable cause, but it was who was going to present that and to which, uh, which prosecutor was it going to be through the federal prosecutor? Through the state prosecutor. So Ryan and Mike were handling all that amber sales. So we knew we had time on our end because Versailles was wasn't going to kick off until those things happened. And ultimately, it was much later in the day before we got got those actions.

00:40:23 Captain Dallas Greer: So a a question and not to get too technical, but if you can just kind of talk. You had mentioned that all those devices, you knew that they were devices that didn't have to be dealt with right there, right on site, that they could be packaged up and disposed of later. How do you guys make that determination? I mean, obviously you got training and education, but but is that are you able to look at that visually and make that call or. I know Matt had mentioned, uh, X-ray. Like, how is it without giving away anything that's that's it's both, it's both.

00:40:52 Matthew Greathouse: You, you're going to go up and say, oh, I can see that's one, that's a device that's very okay, I can I don't have any issue with picking this up and moving it. And so part of that threat assessment is, well, he was wearing this thing and moving around. So I know if I shake it and move it, it's not going to go off. So all that, all that stuff comes into play. And, and you use that part as your as your threat matrix and what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. But, and I don't know if we, I think we employ the TCV there, which is a total containment vessel for those out there. It's looks like a big diving bell. It's a big black steel ball that sits on a trailer for the Lexington Police Department. We share it throughout the entire state, and it's you open it up. You can stick a certain amount of weight, physical weight inside of the device and if it were to go off, it will contain it within there. We also use that for countermeasures later on, which we'll talk about that. We ended up on day three. Uh, but that allows us to put that in a steel ball, close it up, and then we've shrunk that down so we can virtually outside of, in just regular crime scene, you can open that hospital back up for regular service.

00:41:50 Captain Dallas Greer: Okay.

00:41:50 Matthew Greathouse: Um, so that's what that is. And it's just really, it's just the experience of going down and understanding how the devices work and what and what they do. And that's where bomb tech, basic bomb tech, you can get a little bit of that. But through the advanced training that we get through ATF and FBI, that's where all that stuff comes in.

00:42:08 Captain Dallas Greer: We still have so much to talk about. So please join us next time as we continue our conversation about this seizure of illegal homemade explosives. Behind every badge is a human being with a family, a purpose, and a commitment to protect others. We're grateful for the work that all of you do for taking the time to sit down with us. To everyone listening, thank you for joining us. Stay safe. Take care of each other, and we'll see you next time.