2018 NJSPBA Valor Awards
Gold Medal of Valor
Police Offi cer Matthew Pretty
Little Egg Harbor Local 295
One offi cer’s quick
thinking saves SWAT team
With a mindset of “It’s not a matter of if
I’m going to die, but when,” Little Egg Har-
bor Local 295 Officer Matthew Pretty led a
SWAT team into the woods. Blanketed by
the thick, palpable darkness of a moonless
night, their night vision goggles had been
rendered ineffective. All they knew was that
somewhere out there, in the mosquito-rid-
den deep summer heat, a mentally ill sub-
ject was ready to kill or be killed. “I’m fixing
to get in a gunfight,” Pretty says, “and hop-
ing I can bring everyone home.”
A few hours earlier, on July 16, 2016, Pret-
ty had been off duty. At about 7 p.m., the
19-year law enforcement veteran, K9 officer,
sniper and Ocean County Regional SWAT
member who also had served multiple de-
ployments with the Army infantry, received
a mass text to respond to a barricade with
shots fired.
Assembling the team
Once assembled, the SWAT team at-
tempted to make contact with the subject
but the man ran out the back door and into
a wooded area, with officers in pursuit. “For
a while there, I was super confident because
I was with a lot of guys I had worked with
for a long time,” Pretty acknowledges. “Un-
fortunately, when the subject moved, I lost
sight of him through the thermal imaging
goggles I was using. I called up our K9 offi-
cer and advised we would have to track the
guy.”
That officer was Stafford Township Local
297 K9 Officer Chris Smith. “Matt really took
control of the whole thing; it was genius,”
Gold Medal of Valor
Offi cer Frank Bopp
Offi cer Mark DeGrandis
Toms River Local 137
NEW JERSEY COPS
A tedious process
Pretty started to lead officers using a te-
dious process of letting the K9 track the hu-
man odor, stopping every 10 feet to turn off
all gun lights to allow an officer using ther-
mal imaging to scan 360 degrees around
their location. At one point, Pretty’s situa-
tional awareness was sparked. “We had an-
other team of officers 100 yards on the other
side of the subject,” Smith recounts. “Matt
saw the other guys turn their flashlights on,
and realized they were in our direct line of
fire.”
Even though radio was intermittent at
best that night, Pretty was able to commu-
nicate the situation to the other team. “He
somehow figured out how to get those guys
to move so that if the suspect shot at us and
we fired back, we wouldn’t be shooting our
own guys,” Smith describes. “Who knew
where those rounds would have gone? It was
smart, very smart.”
After seven cycles of K9 tracking, followed
by thermal imaging — and going into the
fifth hour of this call — Smith’s dog began
pulling toward an unidentified dark mass 50
feet away that might just have been a pile of
garbage. Officers turned on their big spot-
light to illuminate the area and revealed the
subject near a large, storm-fallen tree in a
sit-up position with his revolver to his head.
Stopping the threat
Pretty attempted to negotiate a surrender,
saying, “Let’s talk about it,” but the subject
refused to comply. “The last thing he said to
me was, ‘Don’t come any closer or this will
be a bad night,’” Pretty relates. “Then, he
pointed his weapon at us and I fired.”
Pretty’s round spun the subject, causing
him to drop his gun, but as he continued to
reach for it, Pretty was forced to fire again,
ultimately stopping the threat.
Officers later discovered that some of Pret-
ty’s rounds had hit the front of the subject’s
gun and his shooting hand. “This means
he was pointing it directly at us,” Smith ex-
trapolates. “Without Matt, there were six of
us in that group, and I’m pretty confident
the guy would have gotten a round off. And
if Matt hadn’t shot the second that he did,
if he waited one more second and the guy
gets a round off and hits one of us, one of us
is dead. You pray you never have to [shoot
somebody], and I feel bad he has to live with
that, but I tell Matt all the time, you saved
our lives...all six of us.”
Resourceful Response
As soon as a snow day was announced
on March 14, 2017, Toms River Police De-
partment Officers Frank Bopp and Mark
DeGrandis knew that they were not going to
have a typical day on the job. The school re-
source officers were used to reporting each
morning to the local high schools they were
assigned to. But with schools closed, the two
Toms River Local 137 members were instead
sent on a wellbeing check with a Psychologi-
cal Evaluation Screening System (PESS) rep-
46
Smith recalls. “The things he did that night,
I’ll remember the rest of my life.”
■ DECEMBER 2018
resentative.
Bopp’s wife Kim remembers that after-
noon perfectly. It was just another day on
the job. Before her husband arrived at the
residence of the wellbeing visit, Kim re-
ceived a text from him, asking her what their
plans were for dinner that evening. Within
an hour, she would receive another text no-
tifying her that Bopp and DeGrandis were
involved in a dangerous encounter and she
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