"Get down! Get down! Get down! He's trying to shoot at us! He's trying to shoot at us!"

One of the truisms I learned in journalism was that alcohol caused more misery than any other substance. It wasn't even close. Police reports had a code for it: HBD. Had Been Drinking.

Another one from the newspaper career clip books, this time from January 1999 while I worked at the Eugene Register-Guard in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Some stories stick with you and this was one. Not because it was earth shattering news or provided some great insight into human nature. If anything it was routinely senseless; tragic and stupid in equal measure. But what sticks with me still is something I left hanging when I reported on it.

Nothing good happens in rural Oregon at 1 a.m. on a Saturday after a Friday night of drinking, and the 1991 Ford pickup barreling down a country road south of Eugene had Drunken Fool at the wheel and Mean Drunk riding shotgun. Or deer rifle, actually.

Oregon State Police Trooper James Hawkins clocked the pickup at more than 90 mph and lit them up with his overheads, as the cops used to say.

A 58-year-old woman was driving. The passenger was her husband, 64, a busted-up logger with bad legs. His last name was Free and she’d taken his last name as well. You can’t make this stuff up.

The couple lived in a trailer on timbered property owned by somebody else, with the wife apparently employed as a night watchman. Family members said the husband liked beer and guns and intensely disliked police.

But on this night the couple had been out celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary, so maybe they were happy as hell in addition to being drunker than shit.

I covered the cops beat my first three years as a reporter, 1980-83, and read overnight reports and dispatch logs at three police agencies and the fire department every weekday morning. Nothing was online. I’d go in, make small talk with the clerks, leaf through a stack of papers and take notes.

I was as green as they come; it was all new to me. But reading through those police reports every morning introduced me to cops and the world they saw. Firefighters and paramedics, too. And prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges. I was fascinated. “Holy shit…” may have been my most frequent utterance.

One thing was clear as anything, right off: Alcohol was at the root of more fucking misery than any other substance and, like I said, it wasn’t even close. Domestic spats, bar fights, parking lot swingdowns, all kinds of car wrecks, accidents, homicides, health problems. There was meth, cocaine, weed of course, and some heroin out there, but alcohol beat them all down. HBD was the police report shorthand for it. Had Been Drinking.

It happened on Jan. 23, 1999, 26 years ago today. When the trooper came up behind the Ford pickup at 1 a.m. on that Saturday, the husband reportedly tromped his wife’s foot on the gas pedal. She pulled over on Bear Creek Road, however, and Trooper Hawkins had her step out of the pickup to do a field sobriety test.

The husband got out of the pickup, too, and stood near the tailgate. Hawkins told him he could watch as long as he didn’t interfere. The trooper told the driver she was under arrest for driving under the influence. She insisted she was fine.

As Hawkins prepared to handcuff the woman, her husband stepped back to the cab, grabbed a 30-30 hunting rifle, levered a round into the chamber, leaned against the rear fender and aimed at the trooper.

Police didn’t have body cameras then, but Hawkins had a tape recorder in his shirt pocket and was recording the DUII arrest for evidence. The audio was remarkable at the time and I can still hear the alarm and tension in the trooper’s voice. The district attorney’s office played the tape at a news conference several days later when they announced the shooting was justified. We ran a transcript of it in the newspaper along with my story. Nobody was online then but in print we listed the phone number of our “Guardline,” where you could call up and listen to the recording yourself.

“Drop it! Drop it!” Hawkins shouted, and he pulled his .40 caliber Glock pistol and opened fire. On the tape you could hear at least nine rapid pops.

One round went through the bed railing of the pickup truck and hit the man in the chest, another round grazed the left side of his forehead and a third glanced off his left hand and hit him in the head.

The logger got off one round and missed, firing between the trooper’s fourth and sixth shots. A test later showed the man’s blood-alcohol level was .16 percent, twice the level at which Oregon law presumes people are under the influence.

Instantaneously amid the flurry of shots, Hawkins shouted at the woman to get down and pushed her to cover. “He’s trying to shoot at us! Get down!” he shouted.

“Don’t mess with him,” the oblivious woman slurred at the trooper. “I’m telling you, don’t mess with him.”

“I haven’t had that much to drink,” she added, as Hawkins radioed for backup.

“Code 99, code 99!” the trooper shouted. “Twenty-six (his radio call sign), shots fired!”

“Don’t do this, I haven’t had but two beers tonight,” the woman said.

The trooper crept forward, found the man mortally wounded, and told the dispatcher to send an ambulance.

“Twenty-six, I’m code four (OK). I’ve got one down. Get me a 12-18 here.”

The Lane County district attorney’s office concluded Hawkins was justified in his use of deadly force, including firing first. “You’re not required to wait for them to shoot, you’re entitled to defend yourself,” said the Chief Deputy District Attorney, who headed the investigation.

“When he’s looking down the barrel of a 30-30, he has no choice but to protect himself and Mrs. Free,” an Oregon State Police sergeant said. Later, an OSP spokesman said the tape recording would be used for recruits undergoing officer survival training.

The investigators said Hawkins acted heroically in protecting the logger’s wife. The DA dropped the drunk driving charge against the woman, saying it was the humane thing to do, given her loss.

After the press conference, photographer Brian Davies and I went out to see the logger’s family, because that was what you did when you worked for a newspaper.

Assorted relatives sat around glumly; he had four sons, and one of his daughters-in-law showed some photos and did most of the talking. She seemed a decent sort.

She said the family would remember him for putting on chicken barbecues, taking relatives on boat rides and getting together with friends. She acknowledged he drank heavily and was “ornery” at times, but said most people considered him a “good old boy.”

“He was a working man and we loved him,” the daughter-in-law said.

And that was when I left something hanging.

One of the family members at the gathering was the dead man’s grandson. The boy was 10 or 12 or so and was keeping his upper lip stiff. He said something to the effect that Grandpa had lived life on his terms, and that was good; he had died the way he would have wanted. The boy somberly kept his chin up as he repeated what had become the family line.

I stared at the boy. I didn’t say anything. When I got back to the office and wrote the story, I didn’t use what the boy said. I left it hanging there.

I knew there wasn’t one person in that family that was going to tell that boy the truth: That his grandpa was an idiot, that his grandpa was a dangerous, drunken, violent fool who tried to murder a police officer and easily could have killed his grandmother, too.

Maybe he realizes that now, 26 years later. It wasn’t for me to tell him then, so I left it hanging. But I still think about it.

A busted up logger named Free. Had been drinking. Was now dead.