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3 women terrorized at gunpoint
Thursday, March 02, 2000 By Mike Rosenwald, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Lunch time was approaching and Joyce Ambrose, a nurse at Metro Family Practice in Wilkinsburg, was hungry. She first needed to check whether there were any patients waiting.
Ambrose had no inkling about what would happen when she walked out to a reception area at about 11:40 a.m. yesterday.
At first, she didn't see the man with the gun, Ronald Taylor, the suspect in a shooting spree in the neighborhood moments earlier that killed two and wounded three.
What Ambrose saw were co-workers Debbie Nicomede, a nurse, and Patty Papenmeier, a computer programmer.
Both looked stricken.
"Her eyes were bugged out," Ambrose said of Nicomede. "She just had this look of disbelief about her."
Papenmeier "had this look on her face that said 'shut up.' "
"What's the matter?" Ambrose asked.
That's when she saw Taylor, standing off to the side. She hadn't seen the gun yet. Taylor was holding it at his side.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go."
"Are you one of our patients?" Ambrose asked.
That's when Taylor brandished the gun, asking, "Do you know how many people I've shot today? I have one bullet left. Which one of you should I use it on?"
The three employees were among eight staffers and two doctors in the medical office on the ground floor of the Penn West Building (formerly Columbia Hospital) when Taylor intruded. Because of the approaching lunch hour, no patients were there.
Taylor made the three women walk side by side down a narrow hallway. He stood beside them, pointing the gun at all three.
Ambrose said Taylor appeared calm. He didn't yell or curse or shove them. She wondered whether he was bluffing, whether he really had a bullet in the gun.
"I'm gonna use this bullet, but I still don't know which one it should be on," Taylor repeated.
Ambrose said, "What's the matter? Can I help you?"
Taylor looked at Nicomede, the most visibly shaken of the three employees. "Her eyes were like 50-cent pieces," Ambrose said.
Taylor seemed to notice how scared Nicomede was and pointed the gun at her head.
"You! You look like a smart white bitch."
He grabbed her wrist.
"No," he said. "I think I want to terrorize you for a while."
Taylor then bolted into an examination room. Ambrose stayed but the other two women fled.
"When you come back in here, I'll be gone," Taylor told Ambrose, shutting the door. She thought he meant he was going to kill himself.
She ran to tell other people to get out of the building and when she came back she saw Taylor in the hallway again, with the gun at his head, scratching himself with the barrel.
She ran out of the building.
Not far away, Dr. Kate Patterson was oblivious to the mayhem that had descended on the neighborhood and her office. Seated at a desk in the hallway, she was working on medical charts.
She looked up.
"I saw this guy I didn't recognize walking down the hallway, looking confused, muttering to himself."
A moment later, she saw the gun he was holding to his head.
The agitated man paced a bit and then left the medical offices through a back door that locked behind him. Patterson went to hustle two other women, a staffer and a volunteer, out the front door.
"I need you to come with me and we need to get out of the office," she said, trying not to alarm them.
They hurried out the front door to find a phalanx of SWAT officers, guns drawn and pointed at them, hollering orders that seemed to drown one another out.
"It was more traumatic than anything that happened in the office," Patterson said. "Mostly, I was really confused at what they wanted me to do."
The women ran across West Street in a downpour, crouching behind cars in a parking lot across from their building.
Patterson at the time was uncertain of the whereabouts of four co-workers, including her medical partner, Dr. Dave Freeman. She was worried that he had stayed behind to try to reason with the gunman.
"That's the kind of guy he is."
It turned out that Freeman had briefly encountered Taylor, who pointed the gun at him before muttering to himself and walking away.
As the standoff continued, SWAT officers ordered Patterson and her companions away from the parking lot, sending them down South Avenue. "They told us someone would be along to take care of us."
Twenty minutes passed. No one came to help. Patterson and the others were soaked and cold.
"It could've been a lot smoother, more coordinated," she said of the police activity.
Finally, Patterson spotted the Rev. Diane Shepard, a board member of Metro Family Practice, coming out of her church, St. Stephen's Episcopal. Shepard invited them in.
It would be 3 1/2 hours before Patterson was certain that all of her co-workers were safe.
"We were amazingly lucky that this happened at lunch time," she said. Otherwise, an assortment of patients, including expectant mothers, infants and elderly and disabled persons, would have been there.
Patterson said she moved her practice into the building in November, in a gesture of commitment to a struggling community.
"Until then, we were a Forbes [Health System]-owned practice. Forbes sold the building and pulled out of Wilkinsburg. Rather than go with them, we went independent."
As she made arrangements for a crisis therapist to meet with her traumatized staff today, Patterson said she had no regrets.
"We're all OK but we are emotionally shaken and it will take awhile to get everything back together. But all of us are deeply committed to providing service to the neighborhood and the people in the area.
"We realize this was just a fluke and I don't want this to turn into one more race issue thing. I don't want it to turn into another excuse for people's bigotry.
"This was one crazy person who did this."
Staff writer Donald I. Hammonds contributed to this report.
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