20 YEARS AFTER THE TERROR
Spruce Grove man recalls fateful day
For six hours in 1996, Spruce Grove resident Tom McNeil relied on instincts while being held hostage in a Honolulu business, a sawed-off shotgun duct-taped to his neck by a disgruntled former co-worker.
The Honolulu hostage crisis on Feb. 6, 1996, unfolded after the sixfoot-five John Miranda burst into the Seal Masters of Hawaii building just before 8 a.m., demanding $20,000. It ended around 2:30 p.m. in a hail of police bullets that left Miranda fatally wounded, all of it captured on live television.
Miranda, 28, had been fired months earlier, and was ready to deliver on his promise the ordeal was going to end with a gun blast. Detectives later discovered he had already killed his girlfriend, Sherry Lynn Holmes. The seething Miranda, after hours of unsuccessful bargaining with police, told McNeil, then 30, to count down from 60 before he pulled the trigger.
McNeil refused, twisting away as bullets flew and escaping without serious injury.
“I was not going to count down to my own death,” said McNeil, now 51, recently reflecting on the drama from his Spruce Grove home, noting he had taken the job in Hawaii at the concrete restoration and waterproofing company after working at a plastics facility in Edmonton.
In the aftermath of his brush with the killer, McNeil counted his blessings, quickly married his girlfriend and put down roots in the Aloha State for 21 years. He returned to Canada only when his mysterious health problems were properly diagnosed, not as posttraumatic stress disorder from the hostage-taking, but epilepsy.
HOSTAGE CRISIS
When the shotgun-toting Miranda initially made his cash demand, company owner Harry Lee was ready to hand over the money and deal with a police report later. But Lee’s wife insisted on calling the police and as the call was made, Miranda rounded up five hostages before the SWAT team arrived.
“That’s when it all started getting crazy,” McNeil said, adding one of the hostages, supervisor Guy George, was the one who had laid off Miranda.
With the appearance of the SWAT team, Miranda took aim at George and squeezed the trigger, blowing half of his right leg off. McNeil gave first aid, tying a crude tourniquet around his supervisor’s leg.
But that set Miranda off again. He turned on McNeil, forcing another co-worker — Byron Ansai — to duct tape the barrel of the shotgun to McNeil’s neck and the handle to Miranda’s hand.
George used that distraction to risk an escape, jumping out a window and falling 41/2 metres to the ground, where authorities whisked him to safety.
Miranda then ordered the hostages to an outdoor staircase where everyone managed to flee until there was just Miranda and McNeil.
For the next six hours, it was Miranda, McNeil and the SWAT team.
“It was beyond afraid, even; it was a feeling that I better not do anything crazy to make the shotgun go off and I better let the SWAT team communicate with the gunman and let them try to handle it,” McNeil said.
FIGHT TO SURVIVE
In the heat on the metal staircase after all those hours, Miranda finally decided to end it, ordering his hostage to count down from 60.
McNeil recalls believing that Miranda could say “10,” but that could mean zero.
It was do or die.
“It’s kind of strange to put it to words, but the SWAT team was just going ballistic and there was yelling and chaos,” McNeil said.
So he turned ever so slightly to the left, feeling the shotgun shift a bit to the right on his neck.
The humid Honolulu air had allowed the duct tape to loosen.
With a swift motion, McNeil swung hard to the left. Miranda pulled the trigger. A shot went through McNeil’s sweat-drenched T-shirt.
He spun around and grabbed the shotgun, fighting with the hulking hostage-taker. McNeil ducked. He heard a boom. Miranda had fired another shot. The SWAT team fired 13 shots back.
“Then he drops and the SWAT team is yelling at me to get away from the area, so I’m kind of scrambling to get away from that area and I’m looking over. It’s very strange,” McNeil recalled.
“I’m looking at John Miranda dying and wincing, but the shotgun’s not there.”
McNeil had been running away with the gun still hanging by the duct tape from his head. He lay down, pointing to the gun.
“I grabbed the barrel of it and said the words, ‘I’ve had about enough of you today,’ ” McNeil said, recalling how he ripped off the duct tape and gun.
“When I got in the ambulance, my heart was racing out of my chest. My blood pressure was skyrocketing. But I knew that I wasn’t shot.”
When I got in the ambulance, my heart was racing out of my chest. My blood pressure was skyrocketing. But I knew that I wasn’t shot.
BODY FOUND IN GRAVE
Miranda was taken to hospital, where he later died.
An autopsy determined he had drugs in his system, including cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana.
When McNeil started getting calls from the media, they asked if Miranda had mentioned his girlfriend, who had been reported missing Jan. 31, 1996.
Police would later learn from an informant that the 32-yearold woman’s body was buried in a swampy area in the Kawai Nui Marsh. Her remains were found in a box in a shallow grave.
BEACH WEDDING
Six days after being held hostage, McNeil married his girlfriend Sherri Davidson, the administrative professional at Seal Masters of Hawaii.
The couple, who had already lived together for two years, was married at a friend’s beachside mansion. Lee, their boss, gave the bride away.
The groom’s family in Alberta and the bride’s family in Texas didn’t have a chance to attend. In April, when family members made the trip, the couple held a “fake” wedding ceremony on the island.
A year after the hostage-taking, McNeil and his wife started their own business and he became a licensed contractor.
Business had started picking up, but Davidson found herself longing for Texas. When she returned to her home state, McNeil stayed in Honolulu. Although the couple eventually divorced, they still talk.
SEIZURES AND SURGERY
In 2008, as the world economy crashed, McNeil’s business began to suffer. So did his health.
One moment he was at a friend’s house. Three weeks later, he emerged from a medically induced coma in Honolulu’s Queen’s Hospital.
He had been having seizures. With a diagnosis of epilepsy and with his mother falling ill in 2010, McNeil moved back to Alberta, settling as best as he could in Spruce Grove.
Years later, doctors at the University of Alberta Hospital finally found the culprit behind his epilepsy — a shrunken hippocampus.
McNeil spent November 2015 in hospital as surgeons implanted sensors into his skull, two on each side of his brain.
The neurosurgeon implanted “depth electrodes” with the help of robotics, and the doctors made McNeil have a seizure while hooked up to an EEG machine, while video cameras recorded the seizure to pinpoint the part of the brain where they originated.
Now doctors are deciding whether to perform additional neurosurgery.
“They’re going to do some funky rewiring in this lobe of my brain,” McNeil said matter-of-factly.
Neurologist and epileptologist Dr. Jeffrey Jirsch said he and a team of experts — including a neurosurgeon, neuropsychologist and radiologist — are determining whether to remove McNeil’s scarred brain tissue from the hippocampus.
McNeil is doing well enough that surgery will not happen right away. In the event McNeil’s seizures get worse and they determine the benefits outweigh the risks, the team will try to ensure removal of a scarred piece of brain doesn’t result in paralysis or problems talking.
“When a person gets evaluated for an epilepsy surgery, nobody goes into this cavalierly,” Jirsch said.
“You have to make sure if you’re going to take out brain, that you do it from an area from the brain that he would not be missing terribly.”
Jirsch believes McNeil’s seizures may have initially been caused by alcohol use, something McNeil acknowledges.
The hostage crisis made him something of a celebrity in Hawaii. He could walk into any bar and be recognized, with fellow patrons buying him endless rounds.
“Living this life as a national celebrity, he got to the point where he was just drinking too much,” Jirsch said.
The prolonged seizures caused scars on his brain. Even though he hasn’t been drinking for years, the remnants of other seizures scarred the hippocampus, causing McNeil to have “medically intractable epilepsy,” Jirsch said.
“Having known Tom for a number of years, I’m always remarking that Tom is such a happy-golucky person that somebody with epilepsy and seizures as severe as he presently has, would be terribly stressed,” Jirsch said.
“Tom is an exceptional human. He never gets down about these things. He’s always looking on the bright side.”
Typically, about 70 per cent of the people who have epilepsy surgery do not have another seizure in their life. In about 80 to 90 per cent of cases, there is at least a 50 per cent reduction in the number of seizures.
Jirsch said the biggest worry is that there can be changes in behaviour. “Sometimes a complication can be memory difficulties,” Jirsch said.
VIOLENCE THEN AND NOW
Early into the hostage-taking, Miranda phoned a local radio station, which tried to calm him down. He told the radio station he believed he was fired because of his Hawaiian ancestry.
For the first time in its history, a local TV station went live, and other stations, including CNN, followed suit.
At the time of the hostagetaking, McNeil’s father had been putzing around in his Edmonton garage, with CNN on the television, when he heard “Honolulu” and “hostage.”
He looked up, then went back to work.
It wasn’t until reporters phoned, asking if it was his son on the television, that he realized who was being held hostage.
While broadcasting the hostagetaking live was new for the local Honolulu TV station, broadcasts of violence seem to have become the new norm.
But violence itself has not necessarily increased.
The world is not more violent than it used to be; in fact, in many areas, violence is decreasing, University of Alberta political science professor Andy Knight said.
Part of the increased perception of violence is globalism, Knight said.
“Things that would happen in one corner of the Earth probably wouldn’t have an impact on this side of the world four or five decades ago, but today it seems like next door,” Knight said. “The lines between international and domestic have become so blurry.”
When McNeil considers the state of the world and all he’s been through since the hostage-taking, he offers, in his affable tone, some sage words.
“Don’t spend so much time concentrating on the things you can’t change that are out of your control,” said McNeil. “I see a lot of other people doing that and I see them getting depressed then about something they can’t even change.”