This is the 36th in the award-winning series of close encounters with death by Jamaicans, some of them in prominent positions of the society.

WHENEVER Dullord Thompson talks about the incident, he cries.

Yet, the retired sergeant of police has no qualms about relating the details of his surprise meeting with legendary gunman Dennis Barth, known during the 1970s as ‘Copper’.

A St Catherine resident and father of four, Thompson, now 62, was shot 11 times by ‘Copper’ and his ‘Hot Stepper Posse’ as he left his Rockfort, east Kingston home for work at the police Mobile Reserve in the early morning of Tuesday, August 16, 1977.

He had known ‘Copper’ while he served for two-and-a-half years at the General Penitentiary in Central Kingston, now renamed the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre. Copper was an inmate on the H North block, serving a life sentence for the murder of a policeman and for shooting with intent of another, both before he reached age 18. He and four others escaped custody earlier in the year.

“He and his gang wanted guns and IDs of policemen to pose as police and do robberies. So, they would kill policemen and take their guns and IDs.

“That morning I was supposed to reach work 7:00 o’clock. So, when I came out of my house, five men just came out of a yellow Lancer motor car, stick me up, shouted out ‘police’, and ask me for my gun and my ID,” Thompson said.

“I shouted back at them ‘police’ and told them that I don’t walk with those things. So same time Copper said ‘shoot him’ and rested the AK47 rifle below my heart,” added Thompson, tears flowing as he recounted the ordeal.

“Copper told one of the guys behind me to shoot me, but the guy who was holding a 9mm gun hesitated and Copper just used his AK47 to shoot me. The bullet exited through my neck. Another one used a shotgun and fired a shot that broke my hip bone. The same time I tried to run, but fell to the ground.

“The driver of the car tried to reverse it on me, but I was big in those days, so the car couldn’t go over me. I heard when the driver pull up the handbrake and him come out and said ‘bwoy, whey di gun deh?’. I told him that I didn’t walk with those things and crawled towards the sidewalk when they fired some more shots at me, lots of shots,” Thompson said.

As he lay on the ground, the young policeman was shouting and making a lot of noise while being peppered with shots, but an inner voice told him to be quiet, which might have led the gang to go away, thinking that he was dead.

“When they were shooting me, I wasn’t feeling the shots, maybe because of the amount, but a voice said to me, ‘stop the noise, keep quiet’, and at that time they just walked away casually and went into the car and drove off like nothing happened.

“The car they were driving belonged to a politician at the time. As a matter of fact, the person is still a politician.

“I believed that I would die. My wife came outside and I told her to take care of the children,” Thompson recalled.

Doctors at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), where he was taken for medical treatment, were baffled that he was still alive, and conscious; one even commenting that one of Copper’s shots went through where his heart should have been, but the heart wasn’t there.

He was shot in the legs, buttocks, back, side, chest, arm, and groin. After spending over 12 hours at the KPH, hospital authorities told him that they could not manage to treat his wounds and so he was dispatched to the University Hospital of the West Indies.

“It was Professor (John) Golding who brought me back. He said they had to cut off my foot, and I said anything they want to do they should just do it.

“So, the morning that they were supposed to do the operation, Professor Golding came to me and said ‘Dullie, Dullie, I’m not going to cut off the foot this morning. I am going to try a thing’, and he put my foot in plaster of Paris and put a pin in it,” the former crime fighter said.

Thompson’s right foot is permanently angled slightly sideways, but he is still thankful that he has it and that he is able to walk, run and drive.

The young constable spent six months on sick leave and opted to move from Commission Road in Rockfort, where he spent only one month, and head further east to St Thomas where he stayed with his wife’s relatives during and subsequent to his leave.

It later emerged that Copper’s mother and other members of his family had lived on the road next to where Thompson had moved.

Word soon came that the gang leader and his cronies had gone to the St Thomas village in search of him, apparently to finish the job; but community folk did not give them the information that they sought.

Copper, who was sympathetic to left-leaning third party, the Worker’s Party of Jamaica, was involved in several high-profile robberies. He would often target banks, including Scotiabank in Highgate, St Mary, and the branch in Three Miles in St Andrew.

Copper — who like former National Basketball Association star Patrick Ewing was born at Bond Street, West Kingston — was shot dead by a policeman as he and nine other members of his gang tried to stage a $100,000 hold-up at Caymanas Park racetrack on April 30, 1978. The fugitive, however, fatally shot the policeman before going down. Police reportedly took 101 rounds of ammunition, two submachine magazines and two revolver holsters off his body.

Derrick ‘Shabba’ Adair, a former jockey who was banned from Caymanas Park in 1974 for irregular activities, took over the gang after Copper’s death. At the time of his death, there was a $5,000 reward on his head — a huge amount of money at the time.

“When Copper was killed the police came to St Thomas to ask me if I wanted to look at him and I told them not to bother with that; I just leave everything to God… Everybody was afraid of Copper in those days. He was a little, short, slim brown man who you wouldn’t believe was a gunman,” said the man who spent 35 years as a policeman.

After Thompson resumed duties, he was transferred to Police Control at the commissioner’s office until he retired five years ago. He was initially denied benefits under the National Insurance Scheme because the organisation said that he was not on duty at the time of the incident, but he appealed the decision and ended up getting some assistance.

For over 20 years, Thompson stayed at Police Control, being promoted only twice — in 1983 from constable to corporal, and again in July 2007 to sergeant. The latter was two months before he took early retirement at age 57.

“Sometimes they would tell me that I would get promoted, but when the list came out there was none for me.

“I wanted to leave the Force long before, but because I had my family, and my wife wasn’t working, I said let me just hold on. I was in New York a few years ago and I said as soon as I went back down I would retire and I did that,” the ex-cop said.

The love of his life for 44 years, and wife of 29, Patricia, died April 22 this year. It was the worst time of his life, the cop said.

Now, sometimes with the help of his children, he reflects on the tough times that he had in the rugged constabulary.

“A lot of times I was on patrol and they shot at me,” he said.

“There was this time when we got a call that thieves were breaking into the sugar warehouse on Marcus Garvey Drive, and when we got there in the rain, the gunmen jumped down a place and fired shots that went just over my head,” the policeman continued.

“But that time with Copper was a different experience. They never took any money from me, but it was a lucky thing that I didn’t have my gun on me.

“When Copper was in prison I worked at his block sometimes, and most times while he was talking with the other prisoners he would say to me ‘Mr Warder, I don’t like this and I don’t like that and mi kill anything me see’. He told me that from he was nine years old he had been doing killings,” Thompson said.

These days, the man who has been to the brink of the unknown and back leads a fairly quiet life in which he gives his maker thanks every day.

“I believe in God, I read my Bible over and over again, through and through. I have read the whole Bible several times, and right now I am at Revelation again,” Thompson said.