Near miss: the Andrew Patti incident - The Ayoob Files

American Handgunner, May-June, 2004 by Massad Ayoob

Andrew Patti thinks fast. If he rushes for the phone, this man might try to kick in the door. Andy could get hurt. At best he might have to kill a man in front of his son. He needs to buy time. He says, 'TII tell you what I'll do. I'll call Ward's Garage for you." The man on the other side agrees.

Andy is across the room, away from the window and the door, where his dad has gestured for him to go when the hammering began at the door. Now Andrew closes the blind and gestures to his son to follow him as he quickly goes to the phone, not to call the garage, but to call the police.

It doesn't work. The line is dead. Father and son sprint upstairs, but it's the same story with the phone in the master bedroom.

The youth asks, "What's wrong, Dad'?" The armed citizen replies, "'They've cut the wires."

Second Strike

Andrew Patti and his son stayed up a very long time that night, unable to call for assistance. Andrew was too smart to go outside and risk ambush or leave his son alone. When he finally slept, it was with his Glock resting on his chest.

He would not know until several months later just how right his assessment of the situation was. The moment he opened the door, Robert Tulloch, 17, was planning to sink a razor-sharp hunting knife into him. A few feet away, hidden in the bushes and wearing a ski mask, was his 16 year old partner, six-foot James Parker, armed with a folding knife. Patti's unexpected display of the pistol frightened them off.

The deadly teens surfaced again six months later, a few miles across the slate line in the village of Etna near Hanover, New Hampshire. It had taken them a while to gel over nearly being shot by their last intended victim. As they hardened their courage, they ramped up their equipment. They were now armed with high-quality SOG SEAL 2000 combat knives they had purchased over the Internet. This time their victims were a middle-aged couple who were both college professors at Hanover's Ivy League Dartmouth.

Half (rhymes with Ralph) and Suzanne Zantop were only a few years older than Andrew and Diane Patti, and were like them in many ways. Both couples were caring and compassionate and went out of their way for others in need. Both couples were educated, cultured, and well liked by those who knew them. But there was one critical difference. Andrew Patti was a street-wise armed citizen, and the Zantops were not.

Tulloch and Parker gained entry into the Zantops' $470,000 home on the pre text of being students who needed to talk to them about a research survey. The Zantops were people who lived to help students, and welcomed them inside.

The carnage that followed was appalling. Both teens wielded their knives with merciless savagery. When it was over, the gentle professors lay dead in a lake of blood with wounds akin to those suffered by Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in another highly-publicized double knife homicide.

It became national news. This writer works for a police department a short drive from Hanover, and watched from the sidelines as a task force led by New Hampshire State Police and Hanover PD expertly investigated what the media dubbed "the Dartmouth Murders." Realizing that law enforcement was closing in on them, Tulloch and Parker fled, hitchhiking toward the heartland. Before long, they were recognized at a truck stop by an alert police sergeant in Indiana. Arrest, trial, verdicts and sentencing came swiftly.