Hostage situation hits close to home
Five years ago, Jordan Bruce was working at a gas station when he was held up at gunpoint. Up until last week, he never thought it would happen again.
Fast forward to November 27, 2006 at about 9 a.m. Jane Mitchell was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. She looked up at the mirror and saw a man standing behind her, in a hat and sunglasses.
“Like, my son said, [it was like] a bad B movie,” Mitchell said.
The man was 42-year-old Scott Thornton of Oklahoma City.
“I turned around and saw that he was wearing surgical gloves and had a gun. Not a good sign,” she said. “I screamed and he grabbed me and told me to be quiet.”
Thornton then took Mitchell, the wife of Oklahoma Christian University engineering dean Robert Mitchell, to her bank and ordered her to withdraw between $700 and $750. The captor then informed Mitchell that they were going to Home Depot.
“I thought he planned to get out and try to blend in with the crowd, but when we got there he took me out of the car and into the store,” she said. “He made me push a shopping cart while he walked with his arm around me, holding me close to him.”
Mitchell says Thornton carefully chose some power tools and proceeded to the self-checkout, where she was able to break free.
“When he let go of me to unload the cart, I threw my wallet and took off running, screaming.”
Thornton fled the store and some employees chased after him. Several area schools were in lockdown mode during the ordeal, as police were unsure of where the suspect fled after he escaped Home Depot.
Unbeknownst to the police, Thornton ran through a neighborhood and right into the home of former Oklahoma Christian student Jordan Bruce.
“I was actually still asleep. I had the day off,” Bruce said. “I can sleep through just about anything. Obviously this is proof.”
Bruce says his roommate, Justin Sinder, was sitting at the computer sometime before 10 a.m. when Thornton entered through their back door. He locked the doors and checked the windows before grabbing Sinder by his hair.
“That’s when he grabbed him and said ‘you make a sound, I’m going to kill you,’” Bruce said. “That was what he woke up to—a great start to a Monday.”
“I woke up a little before 10 to police knocking at the door, and they had their guns drawn,” Bruce said.
Visible from Bruce’s bedroom window is the front door of the house.
“I thought it was weird that they had their guns out and I was like, ‘what is this?”
Bruce got out of bed and went down the hall to answer the door.
“He [Sinder] was sitting at the couch that was there,” Bruce said, pointing to a spot in their living room visible directly from the hallway where the bedrooms are. “I saw some other guy sitting on the couch. I figured it was Justin’s friend from school or something like that. I couldn’t really tell. Then it’s some creepy guy running up on me—a white trash bash in the living room.”
Thornton then threw Bruce down on a couch in the other corner of the room.
“I just rolled out of bed. So I’m just sitting here in my boxers, just chilling. Boxers and t-shirt for three hours,” Bruce said. “He [Thornton] said, ‘I’m on the run, and we’re not going anywhere until I can go somewhere.’
Bruce said the two were doing everything they could to please their captor. They gave him sodas and let him use Bruce’s electric razor.
“My sister said she’s going to get me a new one for Christmas so I don’t have to use the same one as the bad guy, is what she said.”
Thornton also took one of Bruce’s shirts. He ripped a hole in his own while trying to hide in some bushes, Bruce said, and asked Bruce for one of his.
“I was hoping he’d grab a t-shirt, but he grabbed one of my nice Eddie Bauer sweaters. Jerk,” Bruce said. “But he looked better for his mug shot.”
The two roommates kept calm during the whole ordeal. At one point, Sinder sent out the text message that may have saved their lives.
“When I was running around distracting him, Justin grabbed his cell phone, which was on the table. He was sitting up like this,” Bruce said, putting his left leg over the arm of the chair with his hand on his phone in the corner of the couch. “He doesn’t have to look at his phone to text message so he’s sending text messages blind. It looks like you’re not doing anything, you’re just sitting there.”
Sinder began sending text messages to his girlfriend’s mother, asking her to send police. Thanks to Sinder’s quick thinking, police were able to pinpoint the exact location of Thornton. Before this, they were running around neighborhoods and schools and shopping centers trying to narrow down the area to where they thought Thornton escaped.
The S.W.A.T. team was dispatched and surrounded the home. The commander was sitting next to Sinder’s girlfriend, telling her what to text next.
“He asked us to turn on the news and Channel 5 was doing a live broadcast. In the broadcast they said that someone inside the house was able to send out text messages, which was not cool, not cool at all,” Bruce said.
Bruce said the Edmond police chief contacted the news station and informed them that what they did was dangerous.
After the police arrived, Sinder’s and Bruce’s roommate, Jared Smith, received a phone call.
“My sister called and was crying and said ‘you need to get home, your roommates are being held hostage,’” Smith said.
Smith drew three different diagrams of the house for the police, FBI and S.W.A.T. teams. The police asked him to provide physical descriptions of his roomates. However, the descriptions were so similar that the police treated all three men as suspects. They were taken to the police station and into separate rooms for individual statements.
Bruce says once Thornton realized he was not going to escape without charges, he surrendered.
“By the time [Thornton] was completely surrounded, he was just broken. He knew he was going back in [to jail],” Bruce said.
Mitchell says she, like Sinder and Bruce, remained calm throughout the encounter.
“I credit the Spirit of God for giving me calm and believe that God and his angels kept me safe, as well as all the other people who could have been injured or killed,” she said.
Five years after his first encounter with a gunman and almost two weeks after his second, Bruce says people wonder if bad karma is to blame.
“Some people are asking me ‘what’d you do?’ Wrong place at the wrong time, I guess,” Bruce said. “In five years on that day Jared’s got to sit right next to me all day. He’s taking the day off.”
Photo by Aubrey Coble
