Talking Out a Gunman

Ending a New England vacation, Dr. Jesse James Pone Jr. was driving home to Westbury, Long Island, when he heard a radio report of a double shooting in New Cassel, only a couple of miles from Westbury. At that very moment, said the radio, the man with the gun was barricaded in a basement laundry room, where police had been besieging him for hours. They dared not use force, because the man was threatening to kill the two-year-old girl whom he was holding as hostage. What really gripped Pone's attention was the gunman's name: Winston Mitchell. For Mitchell was one of his patients.

Dr. Pone raced to New Cassel. Outside the laundry room with the police lay Mitchell's common-law wife on a stretcher. He had shot both her and her brother after an argument. Mitchell ignored the wounded woman's pleas to come out and give up the child. Then Pone took over. Pone used Negro psychology-sociology to make his case to Mitchell, also a Negro.

Pone talked to Mitchell through a barricaded door. "There's been a lot of talk about the absence of black fathers in black homes," he said. "I have a responsibility to keep your daughter's father alive. Black babies need black fathers." He told Mitchell that his daughter did not need the additional disadvantage of having to say that her father was a murderer and had committed suicide, or had been gunned down by the police. "I asked him if he wanted some other man to be responsible for her education, or walking down the aisle when she got married. I pointed out that his main responsibility was to stay alive for his daughter."

After almost an hour of such persuasion, Dr. Pone got Mitchell to open the door a crack and accept a bottle of milk for the child. The psychology was working. Soon, Mitchell meekly opened the door of his cubicle, put his pistol in Pone's hand and emerged with the unharmed child in his arms.

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