Firearms and Explosives, had already been pursuing Gray for the past three weeks, arranging undercover buys from him in the parking lots of Pizza Hut, Target, 7-Eleven, and Petco in several northern Shenandoah Valley towns. (During the Petco buy, Gray had ridden shotgun with a girlfriend who had her two-year-old in the back seat.) Metcalf surreptitiously captured the buys on video from his vehicle and supplemented the visual record with an audio wire he’d tucked into the clothes of his confidential informant. Metcalf had been called into the case a month earlier by a detective buddy in Front Royal, a half hour east of Woodstock, who explained that Gray was carrying guns, in violation of his probation terms.
Lutz had teamed with Metcalf before on cases and admired his ability to work all night and keep going the next day. “ATF agents are the street cops of the federal world; they’re a different breed and very much more gung ho than we’re allowed to be,” Lutz told me in early 2016. “The [Obama] administration is trying to rein ’em in a little; if there aren’t guns connected to a case, they want ’em to pull back. But ATF agents want to work. They’re like, ‘Call us, call us, call us.’”
Every officer and prosecutor involved in the sprawling D.C. investigation used the same word to describe Metcalf: “relentless.” Frequently they used the same phrase: “He can be a pain in the ass.” “We’ve almost come to blows a couple times,” said Sergeant Kevin Coffman, the Front Royal officer who alerted Metcalf to Gray’s guns.
*
The two cars screamed as fast as ninety miles an hour. Gray led the local officer on a squealing chase through Middletown, a one-stoplight hamlet, down a scenic byway across I-81, and into neighboring Strasburg. On the southern edge of Strasburg, Gray abruptly stomped his brakes, causing the cruiser to ram the tail of the Hyundai and veer into an embankment before skidding and coming to rest on its side. The wreck left the officer with minor injuries. His police dog, a black Lab named Trooper, broke loose and ran frantically around the totaled car, his training toys strewn across the street.
While the officer extricated himself from the vehicle, Gray drove away, then abandoned his Hyundai and took off on foot—less than a mile from the field where Jesse Bolstridge had made his hometown football fans stand and roar.
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The case was sprouting new tentacles by the day. As it stretched across state and county lines, Metcalf called in a federal prosecutor from Roanoke who specialized in heroin cases, and a grand jury was eventually convened. The prosecutor’s Obama-era marching orders, according to a road map written by then–attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., was to use discretion in filing criminal charges, reserving the harshest penalties for serious, high-level, and/or violent drug traffickers. Responding to a nearly sixfold increase in the national prison population between 1972 and 2008, Holder wrote: “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for truly no good law enforcement reason.”
This case seemed to fit all the criteria. It targeted the biggest dealers.
But to get the worst offenders off the streets, investigators typically need witnesses in the form of user-dealers. It’s a messy and often dangerous business, in which police try to glean evidence and witness testimony from lower-level offenders in exchange for what’s called substantial assistance. The unofficial interviews are not typically part of the public record, giving prosecutors and law enforcement officers alike a great deal of discretion over which witnesses to believe and which to target for the harshest punishment.
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With a fugitive hit-and-run now among his list of offenses, Gray was definitely in the mid-level category. The day after the high-speed chase, he reached out from his hideout—in a tiny town near the base of Shenandoah Mountain—to the same informant Metcalf used for the earlier drug buys. Gray was desperate to buy a gun. (On the day of the chase, he had left the house without his usual complement of weaponry.) Metcalf was eager to do the undercover deal.
Within a week, a new setup was arranged to focus on Gray, a Florida native with a history of evading police. Metcalf arranged to meet Gray and trade him a gun for heroin. The deal would take place in a local storage facility, a public space with long rows of buildings and surrounding fences—easy to surround at a moment’s notice by throngs of federal and local police.