WOMAN: Code 3.
All officers stay down.
Shots are being fired from AK-47s.
I am Rick Massa, and the North Hollywood shootout
changed my life forever.
I grew up in North Hollywood, California.
I was in the first SWAT team that had ever started,
and I was very proud of that.
We would handle only the high-threat incidents
that happened in the city--
high-risk warrants, hostage rescue,
flying on the outside of helicopters,
fast roping, rappelling.
These are things that kids dream of doing,
and yet here I am, an adult, doing
it, and getting paid to do it.
February 28, 1997.
One of our police officers comes flying into the academy
in his black-and-white yelling that there is a bank robbery
in progress in North Hollywood.
The two suspects, Emil Matasareanu and Larry Phillips,
they are takeover bandits.
They know that armored cars were dropping off upwards
of $1 million in the morning.
They had magazines, assault weapons, body armor.
They look like they just came off a battlefield.
They walk in.
They put a number of rounds into the ceiling.
They don't go to the tellers.
They go straight to the bank vault.
One of the problems the suspects had
while they were in the bank--
they became a victim of their own robbery.
The two prior bank robberies, they made off with $800,000,
$750,000 each robbery.
They go into the vault, and they see there's only $300,000.
And now they're upset.
And once they were thoroughly upset,
they exited the bank, walking right into a uniformed patrol
officer.
MAN: [inaudible] rapid automatic fire.
They're [inaudible] the area with fire.
RICK MASSA: As soon as they saw the black-and-whites,
they opened up on anything and everything that moved.
The uniformed patrol officers had
a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, a .38 revolver,
and shotguns that were ineffective,
but yet they never gave up, and they
continued after the suspects.
That caused my heart to hit the bottom of my stomach.
There is no police officer anywhere in the United States
who likes to hear an officer down.
En route to the bank, it does enter your head--
am I going to be a victim of this call-up,
or am I going to be able to help resolve this call-up?
In SWAT, you don't dwell on it.
Otherwise, you're in the wrong line of business.
We pulled up.
We went to find out what was going on
and where the suspect was.
It was at that time Larry Phillips
is walking down the street and has
a malfunction with his AK-47.
He continues walking down the street
with a Beretta 9-millimeter, and he's shooting
at anything that moves.
He gets shot in the hand.
He drops the weapon.
He picks it up, puts the weapon under his chin, presses
the trigger.
Emil Matasareanu, he is now trying to carjack anybody's
car that he comes close to.
He sees us coming, and he shoots a number of rounds at our car.
And we are trying to return fire.
I can't see him.
He is completely hidden by the front of his car.
I'm looking under our car, under his car, and I see his feet.
So I now shoot, and I hit him two or three times
in his ankle, which drops him.
We approach the suspect, and I pulled the suspect's mask off.
And he looked up at me, and he said, why don't you just
put a round through my head?
I told him, no.
I just wanted to see him in court at that point.
But he had succumbed to his wounds,
and he had bled to death.
Between the time the suspects go in the bank and the time
we put the last suspect down was 44 minutes.
In our own department, we received
the Medal of Valor, which is the highest
award given by our department.
One of the hardest things for me to accept out
of this whole incident-- people were calling us heroes,
and we're not.
We're just SWAT officers that were put in a situation
that we were able to resolve it.
I retired in 2006 after 35 years.
Now I teach officers mindset, safety, tactics.
Prior to the North Hollywood shootout,
I did not like getting in front of groups of people
and talking.
That wasn't me.
But the most important things that I've learned
is to share what I went through with other officers
on how to respond, how not to quit.
The North Hollywood shootout made
me realize no matter what the odds are, you fight through it.