New surveillance video from the Twin Falls In-N-Out shows one man run at the threat while everyone else ran from it. Here’s what he did.
Twin Falls PD released new surveillance video of the August 1 In-N-Out shooting featuring an off-duty Idaho State Police trooper who happened to be inside when it started.
He wasn’t on duty. He wasn’t dressed for it. He was a customer. Then a 24-year-old named Chad Williams opened fire at the drive-thru window, and this trooper went to work.
First thing on the video: he comes over the counter. Not out the door, not to the floor — over the counter, toward the register line where the employees were. In-N-Out crews are kids. Teenagers, early twenties. He gets them up and moves them out from behind the line while the shooting is still going.
Then he starts clearing toward the threat.
That’s the phrase people always use — running toward the sound of gunfire while everyone else runs the other way. On this footage it isn’t a phrase. It’s a man doing it, on camera, with no radio, no backup, and no cover team.
And his tactics held up. Watch how he moves. He’s evacuating people and searching for the shooter at the same time, using the building, not bunching up, not freezing. This is a man who has cleared rooms before and it shows. He finds the gunman and trades fire with him.
Here’s what that pressure did.
Williams did not expect to get shot at. They never do. These shooters are counting on a room full of targets and nobody firing back. The moment someone does, the plan comes apart. His handgun jammed. He broke off and went back to his car for a rifle.
He wasn’t the only one putting rounds on the gunman. Outside, an armed citizen named Jordan Salinas engaged him too, and a former Twin Falls officer, Austin James Scott, ran toward the gunfire and was shot for it — he survived. But inside the restaurant, where the employees were, the trooper is the reason that crew got out.
Williams kept going with the rifle. He fired into the drive-thru again, then out toward Blue Lakes Boulevard into cars at a red light, then into two Teslas at a charging station, killing Dale Schultz. Final count: three dead — Garibay, Claunch, Schultz — and seven wounded. Williams ended it himself with a self-inflicted gunshot near the canyon.
The trooper was never hit.
So look at what he bought. A gunman with a handgun, then a rifle, on an open lot full of people. The one thing slowing him down was incoming fire, and the trooper was the source of it inside the building. Every second Williams spent reacting to that trooper — retreating, clearing a jam, going back for another weapon — was a second he wasn’t spending on the kids behind the counter.
Take that trooper off the lot and this is a very different video. The employees he pushed out the back are names on a list instead.
That’s the whole case for what a trained, armed responder does in the first ninety seconds, before anybody’s radio traffic even goes out. He didn’t wait to be on duty. He didn’t wait for permission. He moved to the threat, got the innocent people out, and made the gunman fight for every step.
