"He was down low, I was up high looking down on him. He hadn't really seen me yet. I think he heard me, turned to take a couple shots up toward me, but I don't think he'd actually seen me. I was trying to figure out, what can I do from up here with a bar stool? There's nothing else I can really throw. There's garbage cans but he's too far, I can't hit him with that, they're too heavy.

"And I'm up there trying to figure out, what do I do?"

At that point, "I see a guy creeping up with the gun drawn. And I make eye contact with him."

The man, who was not in uniform, "yells up, 'Ogden City Police Department.' And so I do what I can to motion him," using his hands to indicate the shooter's whereabouts.

"But he (the Ogden officer) got pinned down behind a brick column. The shooter was taking shots at him. I believe he took a couple shots at the shooter, received more shots toward him."

The officer was saying, "Drop the gun, put your hands up, Police Department," he said.

"Neither one of them had a very good shot at each other, so it was just a couple of random shots here and there."

The shooter had ducked into the Pottery Barn Kids store and Dodds could not see him. "I can the see the officer duck down behind a column. He yells out, 'I've only got six shots,"' to indicate he could not keep up a firefight for long.

"Well, I can't see him," Dodds told the Ogden officer. "I can't see him. He's directly underneath me."

Then the Ogden officer "looked the other way, held up his badge, stated he was Ogden City Police Department." He was letting three Salt Lake City police officers, who had just arrived at the scene, know that he was police also.

The three Salt Lake officers, who were armed with automatic rifles, "joined him and turned and went in after the guy."

When he saw them, "I dropped the bar stool 'cause I didn't think I needed that in my hands. Kind of stepped back so I didn't get a ricochet or anything. I figured my duty with the stool was done and I'd let them do their thing with their more efficient weapons."

The officers faced the Pottery Barn Kids store and he could hear orders to drop the weapon, then "bang, bang." The fusillade sounded like fireworks on the Fourth of July, he said.

"It was pretty brief ... A lot of shots taken, all at once."

The police were "very organized and very professional and very strong."

After the shoot-out "it was maybe an organized panic with the evacuation of people. You know, the officers obviously wanted to get them out of the building into safety as fast as they could, but they did it as nicely as possibly could."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com