"After I went over the counter and began wrestling with him, I thought to myself, 'Eric, you're a dead man,'" Fullerton said Tuesday as the honored guest of Footprinters International.
He was named "Citizen of the Year" by the local chapter of the law-enforcement support organization for his heroics last June that helped capture Curtis Allgier, an escaped prison inmate who allegedly shot and killed a Corrections officer earlier that day.
Allgier, 27, allegedly had hijacked a car after the shooting and fled to an Arby's on the city's west side where he held a gun to the head of a clerk before Fullerton went into action and wrested the gun away.
During the altercation, Fullerton's throat was cut after Allgier grabbed a knife in the commotion, and he was shot at by a police officer who was outside the restaurant and mistook him for the gunman.
Last year, the Footprinters gave an award to the police officers who stopped the shooting massacre at Trolley Square and the year before that to a young man who pulled a neighbor from his burning house.
Timing is everything: When lobbyist Jeff Hartley attempted to go into the private, one-stall unisex bathroom on the 3rd floor of the Capitol a few days ago, he walked in on Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper.
Hartley quickly exited the bathroom and closed the door. When Hughes came out, Hartley suggested Hughes lock the door, but Hughes thought he had.
The two checked the lock, then both went inside the bathroom to work with it on the inside to get it fixed. They opened the door and walked out together as a group of lobbyists walked by, giving them a puzzled look.
"You know, you spend years engaged in public service, work through personal and professional sacrifice, try to get some things done and no one knows you," Hughes wrote to me in an e-mail. "But walk out of a bathroom with a lobbyist . . .!"
Heeee's back: Tom Barberi, who for decades prided himself as the "Voice of Reason" as KALL Radio's talk-show guru, is returning to the air.
Barberi, one of the few radio talk show hosts in Utah who doesn't believe the government has been taken over by communist aliens, left KALL several years ago.
His two-hour show resumes on KALL Monday at 5 a.m.
prolly@sltrib.com
