The Alta View Hospital hostage incident began September 20, 1991, when Richard Worthington, armed with a shotgun, a .357 Magnum revolver, and sticks of dynamite arrived at Alta View Hospital in Sandy, Utah, in an attempt to kill Dr. Glade Curtis, who had performed a tubal ligation requested by his wife, Karen Worthington. [1] [2]
Worthington entered the Hospital's Women's Center and took as hostages two nurses, a patient giving birth, her sister, the father, and two newborn babies. [3] Curtis saw what was happening and hid in his office, where he called the police. [3] After Worthington took nurses Susan Woolley and Karla Roth to the parking lot, the police told him to freeze and Roth attempted to wrestle Worthington's shotgun from his hands and was fatally shot. [2] [3]
Worthington held the hostages for eighteen hours. [3] He was talked into surrendering and releasing the remaining hostages by Sergeant Don Bell and Detective Jill Candland of the Salt Lake City police department. [2] [3] Worthington was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for the murder of Roth, and later committed suicide in his prison cell on November 11, 1993. [4]
The incident was portrayed in the 1992 TV movie Deliver Them From Evil: The Taking of Alta View, starring Harry Hamlin as Worthington, Teri Garr as Woolley and Terry O'Quinn as Bell. [5]
In November of 2022, a hostage incident happened in Herriman, Utah, that involved a suicidal man. SWAT were called to the scene for an hours-long standoff until the man, identified as Alma Worthington, a Utah National Guard veteran, opened fire on the authorities trying to evacuate the neighbors, but the SWAT took action and shot Worthington, killing him. A few weeks later, Alma Worthington was identified as Richard Worthington's son.
John Q. is a 2002 American thriller drama film written by James Kearns and directed by Nick Cassavetes. It stars Denzel Washington as the title character, a man who is forced to take a hospital emergency room hostage in order for his son to receive a heart transplant. Robert Duvall, James Woods, Anne Heche, Kimberly Elise, and Ray Liotta appear in supporting roles.
In the United States, a SWAT team is a generic term for a police tactical unit.
Rage is a psychological thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, the first he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was published in 1977 and was collected in the 1985 hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel describes a school shooting, and has been associated with actual high school shooting incidents in the 1980s and 1990s. In response, King allowed the novel to fall out of print. In 2013, King published the anti-firearms violence essay "Guns".
The Hi-Fi murders were the torture of five people resulting in three deaths during a robbery at the Hi-fi Shop, a home audio store in Ogden, Utah, United States, on the evening of April 22, 1974. Several men entered the Hi-fi Shop shortly before closing time and began taking hostages. They forced their victims to drink corrosive drain cleaner, which the perpetrators believed would fatally poison their hostages, but instead caused burns to their mouths and throats. Further violence included kicking a pen into an ear and the brutal rape of an eighteen-year-old woman, before three of the victims were fatally shot. The two surviving victims were left with life-changing injuries.
On April 4, 1991, 41 employees and customers were taken hostage by four gunmen and held at a Good Guys! electronics store at the corner of 65th Street and Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, California, near the Florin Mall for approximately eight hours. Near the end of the hostage crisis, six were killed: three hostages and three of the four hostage-takers. The fourth hostage-taker was captured by authorities, and an additional 14 hostages were injured during the crisis. To this day, the hostage crisis remains the largest hostage rescue operation in US history, with over 40 hostages having been held at gunpoint.
The Salt Lake City Public Library hostage incident occurred on March 5, 1994 in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, when Clifford Lynn Draper held several hostages on the second floor in the former main branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library, which now houses The Leonardo, a culture and arts center.
The Johnson Space Center shooting was an incident of hostage taking that occurred on April 20, 2007 in Building 44, the Communication and Tracking Development Laboratory, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, United States. The gunman, William Phillips, an employee for Jacobs Engineering who worked at Building 44, shot and killed one person and took a hostage for over three hours before committing suicide. Police said Phillips was under review for poor job performance and he feared being dismissed.
The Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) is the municipal police force of Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.
Alta View Hospital is an Intermountain Healthcare member hospital located in Sandy, Utah, United States. In 2019, the hospital completed a renovation that resulted in a new emergency department, new inpatient physical therapy space and a rooftop helipad.
Swatting is a criminal harassment act of deceiving an emergency service into sending a police or emergency service response team to another person's address. This is triggered by false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat, murder, hostage situation, or a false report of a mental health emergency, such as reporting that a person is suicidal or homicidal and may be armed, among other things.
The Newhall incident, also called the Newhall massacre, was a shootout on April 5–6, 1970, in Valencia, California, between two heavily armed criminals and four officers of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). In less than five minutes, the four CHP officers were killed and another man was pistol-whipped in what was at the time the deadliest day in California law enforcement history.
Metropolitan Division, commonly referred to as Metro Division or just Metro, is an elite division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) under its Special Operations Group. Metropolitan Division is responsible for managing the LAPD's specialized crime suppression, K-9, mounted, and SWAT units, named "platoons".
Curtis Michael Allgier is an American white supremacist skinhead who is being held in the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah, for the murder of corrections officer Stephen Anderson.
Tyrone Mitchell was an American spree killer who fatally shot a student and a passerby as well as wounding twelve others who were leaving 49th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles on February 24, 1984. Mitchell then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun.
The 1996 Honolulu hostage crisis occurred on February 6, 1996, in Sand Island, Honolulu, Hawaii, when 28-year-old John Miranda took hostages at the Seal Masters of Hawaii building, his former place of employment. During the hostage crisis, two hostages were injured, one seriously. Miranda was the only fatality during the crisis itself. However, a few weeks after the event, he was found to have murdered his former girlfriend prior to the crisis.
On 5 June 2017, Yacqub Khayre, a 29-year-old Somali-born Australian, murdered a receptionist and held a sex worker hostage at the Buckingham International Serviced Apartments, located in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. In a subsequent shoot-out with a police tactical unit, Khayre was killed and three police officers were wounded. Police consider the siege an act of terrorism.
On July 26, 2017, Jeff Payne, a then detective with the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD), arrested nurse Alex Wubbels at the University of Utah Hospital after she refused to illegally venipuncture an unconscious patient. Footage of the incident released on August 31, 2017, went viral online. The SLCPD announced policy changes which would affect how police should handle situations involving drawing blood, and the hospital announced it would also change its police protocol to avoid repeating the incident. Utah lawmakers made a bill to amend the blood draw policy of Utah law enforcement, which Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed into law on March 15, 2018.
On July 16, 2014, three armed suspects robbed a Bank of the West branch in Stockton, California. After taking three hostages, the suspects fled the scene, pursued by officers of the Stockton Police Department (SPD) in an hour-long pursuit that ended in a shootout. Over the course of the incident, almost 1,000 rounds were exchanged between police and the suspects.
A three-day prison takeover and stand-off took place in 2018 between the Indonesian National Police and inmates convicted of terrorist activities who were imprisoned at the Police's Mobile Brigade Corps's headquarters in Depok, West Java, Indonesia. The inmates took control over one prison block and 6 police officers were taken hostages. As a result of the standoff, five police officers died, with one inmate dead after being shot by the police. Four policemen were also injured in the incident. The Islamic State claimed its fighters were in the standoff. Another policeman was stabbed to death at the headquarters of the elite Mobile Brigade police after the siege by a terrorist who was later shot and killed.
The Soldiers of Aryan Culture (SAC), sometimes referred to erroneously as Soldiers of the Aryan Culture or Soldiers of an Aryan Culture, is a large white supremacist prison gang in the United States.