This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Correction: Sarita Hammond's first name was misspelled in a Wednesday story about her husband, Ogden Police Officer Kenneth Hammond.
OGDEN - Staring down on a gunman's carnage at Trolley Square, Ogden police officer Kenneth Hammond had a choice: retreat to safety with his pregnant wife or confront a killer. He chose to act.
Off-duty but armed with a .45-caliber handgun, he exchanged fire with 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic, who had killed five people and wounded four in less than six minutes at the Salt Lake City mall.
Joined by a Salt Lake City police officer who arrived three minutes after the first 911 call, he stalled the gunman until a team of SWAT officers fired on the man. It isn't known whose bullets killed Talovic.
"I went out of romantic-date mode to 'I need to protect' mode," Hammond recalled Tuesday at a news conference at the Ogden police station, adding that another officer would have done the same - which in his view, makes him anything but a hero.
"I was just the one that was there," said Hammond, 33, a six-year member of the Ogden Police Department and Ogden resident.
His boss, Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey, disagreed, calling Hammond a hero "by every definition."
Hammond and his wife, Sarita Hammond, had finished a pre-Valentine's Day dinner at Rodizio Grill on the mall's upper floor. Married just a few months, Hammond was waiting on a bench outside the restaurant for his wife. His badge was in his wallet in a back pocket. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.
He heard popping noises that he thought were from construction, but when he looked over the balcony, he saw bodies on the floor below and a man with a shotgun leaving a store. He told Sarita, an Ogden Police dispatcher, to return to Rodizio, "lock down" the restaurant and call 911.
Sarita said Tuesday that she borrowed a waiter's cell phone to tell Salt Lake police that her husband was an off-duty officer, not a second gunman. She described what he was wearing, hoping to protect her husband from officers' fire.
Hammond drew his .45-caliber handgun, but did not dare put it back in his holster to pull out his badge.
To let mall customers and clerks know he was not a second gunman, Hammond said, "I was yelling and screaming as loudly as I possibly could . . . Officer Hammond, off-duty OPD!" and "Get down! Get down!"
"It was tense for a few seconds," he said.
Then he and the gunman traded shots, Hammond on the second floor and the shooter down below. Hammond said he moved to another part of the balcony and lost sight of the gunman. He lay flat, but soon realized the gunman could come up the escalator behind him.
No words were exchanged. In fact, Hammond said he couldn't even describe the shooter. "I was so focused on that gun."
When he looked down again, he saw a Salt Lake City officer below and shouted out that he was an off-duty officer. "I didn't know him. He didn't know me."
Hammond went down the escalator and together the two officers pursued the gunman.
They fired at him and Hammond said there was silence for five to 10 seconds, before he heard rapid gunfire - apparently from the SWAT team - and looked up to see glass falling and the gunman down.
In about nine minutes, the massacre was over.
Shop owner Barrett Dodds had heard the shots and ran to nearby stores and restaurants telling people to lock their doors, then watched the gunman from the second level.
"I saw the carnage - dead bodies, blood, broken glass. It was as bad as you can imagine," he said.
Dodds also saw Hammond crouched low, hiding behind one brick pillar after the next as he moved toward Talovic, who calmly reloaded his gun between killings. He said he signaled the man's location to the officer.
At about the same time, Dodds watched as Salt Lake officers converged on the gunman, forcing him backwards into the Pottery Barn Kids directly below where he stood. He heard the gunshots, knowing the shooter was dead but not willing to look down. "After seeing all that, I had seen enough."
Hammond's courage and the rapid police response - "textbook work," some called it - won praise from inside and out of the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Salt Lake City police Chief Chris Burbank called it "amazing."
"The heroic acts of [Hammond] going in and engaging a subject who was well armed and prepared to engage him, without having the benefits of a uniform, extra equipment or magazines for his firearms, is truly heroic," Burbank said. "There is no question his quick actions saved the lives of numerous other people."
Capt. Roger Winkler, who oversees the SWAT team, said he'd rate the department's rapid response as "as extraordinary, tremendous, wonderful. Every second they kept this guy from walking around, they probably saved another victim's life."
Rodizio manager David Knighton said he planned to offer Hammond and his wife free dinners for a year. "He saved a lot of lives," he said. "We're appreciative for him."
Hammond said the night will be with him "forever."
He said he believes it was no coincidence that he and his wife chose a restaurant in Trolley Square on Monday night, that he had his gun with him, that they decided to have dessert when they usually don't.
"We were there for a reason. Everything happened for a reason."
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* NATE CARLISLE and MICHAEL N. WESTLEY contributed to this story.
KENNETH HAMMOND A six-year member of the Ogden Police Department
"I went out of romantic-date mode to 'I need to protect' mode. . . . I was just the one that was there."