Police: Cop killers’ van had Ohio tags

May 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

WEST MEMPHIS, Ark.

Two police officers doing anti-drug work along a busy Arkansas interstate were shot and killed by two men with AK-47s on Thursday, and the suspects later died in a separate shootout with police in a crowded Walmart parking lot, authorities said.

West Memphis Police Inspector Bert Shelton said officers were “running drug interdiction” on Interstate 40 in east Arkansas when they pulled over a white, 1994 Plymouth Voyager van with Ohio license plates. The two men got out of the van and opened fire on the officers with AK-47s, he said. Brandon Paudert, the son of West Memphis’ police chief, died at the scene, and Bill Evans died at a hospital.

Traffic stopped as authorities searched vehicles on Interstate 40 looking for the suspects, who were later spotted in the parking lot of a nearby Walmart. Dozens of officers swarmed the van, and both suspects were shot and killed, authorities said. The Crittenden County sheriff and his chief deputy were wounded in the shoot-out.

“I heard quite a few loud pops,” Johnna Long, who was inside the Walmart with her 14-year-old son during the shootings, told The Associated Press.

At first, she thought something large had fallen from an upper shelf, she said. But she’d gotten a call a few minutes earlier about a police shooting and made the connection. She then heard more pops and people screaming.

“I couldn’t see what was going on,” Long said, adding that she and other shoppers were confused because no one knew if the shootings would move inside the store.

Walmart employees moved shoppers into the store’s lawn-and-garden section and eventually told them they could get their cars if the vehicles were outside police tape cordoning off the shooting scene, she said. Long left without her sport-utility vehicle. She returned about 6:30 p.m. but still wasn’t allowed to get it.

Walmart employee Iesha Person said she arrived at work around 1:20 p.m. as her co-workers were running out the door.

“I was hearing gunshots,” Person, 19, told The Commercial Appeal. “They were telling me to turn around. So I turned my tail around.”

Another witness described the scene on Interstate 40 as “chaos.” Stacy Gilchrist said she saw a police officer lying in the road when she pulled up.

“It was a disaster; cars were just going everywhere,” Gilchrist told Memphis television station WMC.

Sheriff Dick Busby, who was shot in the arm, and Deputy W.A. Wren, who was shot in the abdomen, were taken to a local hospital, said Larry Godwin, the safety director in Memphis, Tenn. Busby’s condition was not immediately known, but Wren was in critical condition, a spokesman at the Regional Medical Center in Memphis said.

Hours later at the Walmart, an unmarked, blue police car was parked near the white van. The squad’s car doors were open, with blood on the bumper and the asphalt below and bullet holes in the windshield.

Outside the West Memphis Police Department station, officers went in and out, some hugging each other as they passed.

Shelton said the two slain officers were doing the “most dangerous job” in the department because they dealt with drug traffickers.