The famous sewer pipe rescue which I do not recommend to anyone because… well, we had actually planned a more sophisticated lock. We were going to take two lengths of 8” diameter schedule 80, that means a half inch wall pipe which I got from a torn down refinery in Oakland, California. Two lengths of them about 2’ a piece welded side by side and we were going make locks in there somehow for our feet to spring into and they couldn’t come out and that was going to be our big rescue. Well, I couldn’t get the pipes to weld together. We tried to weld them together with oxy/acetylene which was another big mistake, it’s the last thing I would have thought of based on what I know now.
We tried and tried and tried for two or three days to weld these suckers together and we couldn’t. So I was standing in the junk yard the night before the rescue, a lot of things were set in place, sidewalk counselors, picketers, all sorts of things. Being as frustrated as I was, I was determined to make my last attempt for this foot to foot shackle out of two lengths of pipe. This time it was going to be some schedule 40, 8” diameter sewer pipe. I mean this was the last desperate attempt, and I got a scrap of it that was about 5 or 6 foot long. It was terrible, both ends had been cut with a torch, it had a piece steel welded to the side of it that looked like I don’t know what, but it was a rough jagged looking piece of steel. I shudder to think what I did. However, things could have come out much worse.
Anyway so, I left my house trying to cut it but I couldn’t cut the thing. I was inept at using gas torches. I couldn’t even cut schedule 40 pipe. This is pathetic, right? So then I sat there and thought, what can I do with this pipe. Even the way that it was, could I use it in a rescue. So I decided to use an old Boy Scout knot called the taut-line hitch. We had two lengths of rope coming in and we had bowlines around each person’s ankles so it wouldn’t tighten up and hurt your ankle. We had the lines passing by each other then we would tie the taut-line hitch up by your hip let’s say. This is with you sticking your foot in the pipe and the other guy sticking his foot in on the other side. Then you thread the piece of rope through there, I don’t want to give too many details, because I don’t want anyone to do this because it was just a mistake. Suffice it to say, we tied ourselves into this piece of pipe inside the mill, and in the end because we only had one taut-line hitch, it was in a half inch hemp rope.
Brian Hockel was my pipe mate for this rescue and his other leg that wasn’t in the pipe was attached to three other peoples ankles using a large kryptonite lock. This also includes by the way, Nick Brough, who is a small guy and was known for being the guy who went flying in Denver. This big black cop picked him up and just threw him across the sidewalk and he hit the concrete and crawled back to his spot, he was a tough little guy. Nick was one of these mild mannered computer programmers who comes alive when he sees a picket line. God bless him, he’s a great guy.
So Nick and a couple of other guys had their feet stuffed into this big kryptonite lock. The SFFD tried to use the jaws of life to try to snap the krypto and that didn’t work because the krypto chipped the blades. And to add insult to injury, the gas fumes from the unit that powered the jaws of life, which was like a lawn mower engine filled the abortion mill and set off the smoke alarms. It was so funny because, just imagine someone watching from the sidewalk. One minute the police go in and after a while the firemen and then the alarm goes off and the building has to be evacuated. That means mill workers and abortionists, and not only that, it was a basement building which only had two doors. So it took another couple of hours to ventilate the place.
Once the SFFD realized the jaws of life wasn’t an option, they just took their shoes and socks off and greased up their feet and pulled them out. The only time I have ever been able to guarantee that two ankles would be able to stay in a kryptonite lock is if they are stuck into a mini lock. The 3 x 6 kryptonite lock and provided that they are average sized ankles. I have seen two women stick their legs inside a mini lock and they were still able to get their feet out.
They got the other guys detached, so at this point they had me and Brian and this pipe. While the SFFD was pondering how they were going to get Brian and me out of the pipe, I had the privilege of overhearing a conversation between the Chief of Police and the Fire Chief. Me, Brian and the pipe added up to about 450 lbs. At that point the one of the younger firemen suggested that they could get us out of here by putting the pipe on a furniture dolly and putting me and Brian on some stretchers and just wheel and carry us out. Then the mill could resume their operations.
The abortion mill people were saying, “we don’t care if these people ever get detached, we just want them out of here.” That’s what they told the Police. Then the police turned to the Fire Chief and said, “carry them out.” But, do you know what the Fire Chief said? The Fire Chief said that the minute these people are out of this room, we can no longer justify the use of emergency equipment to detach them. “Why?” said the Police Chief. The Fire Chief said, “as it is now we are stretching our authority to use this equipment when there is no one in any immediate danger of death or injury.”
The Fire Department typically uses these tools when someone is in a car wreck on the freeway, and maybe bleeding and there is gas all over the ground or whatever. They usually need to do this in a hurry because the person might die. That’s what those tools were designed for. When the taxpayers paid for these extremely expensive tools, they paid for them for that reason. And they brought in the jaws of life and we all know when happen there, they chipped it on the kryptonite and those blades cost $700. That was $700 of tax payer’s money because the jaws of life gets chipped on the kryptonite. Then the Police Chief says, “if we bring them down to the station as they are, would you then bring your rescue equipment down there and cut them loose?” And the Fire Chief said, “No, once you take them down to the station, then they are your problem.” So, the Fire Department of San Francisco was forced to do whatever they could with me and Brian right there in that mill by virtue of the fact that we were connected.
This is the beauty of krypto and the beauty of importing your own implements. Because even if they could lift you, they don’t want to in that circumstance. Now that might not be true in every city, but things like that happen in all sorts of cities. We are getting to the point where we are reaching the limit of what these guys can deal with. Finally, they got three Fireman on each of us and they yanked real hard and they made the taut-line hitch fail. It hurt, because we didn’t pad our feet. I didn’t want our feet padded for circulation reasons because if it is down there in the middle of that pipe and I am thinking about staying for six hours and I didn’t want some pad like an ace bandage or anything. If we had two taut-line hitches it probably would have held and they would have been forced to cut the pipe which is the next thing they were going to do.
It’s entirely possible that mill was shut down for the whole day. I do know that by the time they got us out of there, we were in the pipe for one hour and five minutes before they realized that they could pull on us and get us out. I didn’t even know that they could pull on us and get us out. I didn’t know that a taut-line hitch could fail if you really put enough pressure on a single taut-line hitch. If you put two or three in there, who knows, maybe it would have worked. But the next thing they would have done was to take the steel saw, which is a chain saw fitted with a 12” abrasive wheel directly on to the drive, no reduction and slice a window into the pipe so they could see what was in there. Once they would discover that it’s just a rope, they could have reached in there and cut it.
The other end of this story is that I got put on trial for assault with a deadly weapon, because I was carrying this thing in and they said that I was using it as a battering ram. Fortunately, their witnesses contradicted themselves. Plus, the month long trial was so ridicules, I could have gotten it thrown out on appeal with no problem because they really messed up.
Keep in mind that the Police are required to make a clean arrests. However, we speak in terms of clean rescues. That means, rescues without an assault wrap. But they speak in terms of clean arrests. That means, an arrest without defect, which means they have to arrest someone whom they believe unquestionably is committing a crime. If they ask us if we are going to leave and we are locked in, that is potentially defective because we can say, “Well gee officer, I don’t know how I got here. But I would love to leave but my feet are all tied in.” If you were working on a technical defense, you could do that kind of stuff.
In fact, not only did they charge me with assault with a deadly weapon and simple assault, they charged me with trespassing under a certain code. A certain sub-set of trespassing called squatting because we had been sitting in that abortion mill for a hour and they figured that they would get clever. They said, “this isn’t just trespassing, this is squatting, we want to get Mr. Kopp on squatting.”
I had a great lawyer, from the public defender’s office, a beautiful Christian lady who helped me out and toward the end she was fuming about abortion. She just started to think about it. You know most people know what abortion is, but you never draw their attention to it long enough to where they dwell on it. And because this was an abortion related case, she started to see what was going on in that mill and toward the end of the trial, she was just spitting blood. She was subpoenaing the abortionist to be on the stand and all sorts of things that an aggressive pro-life lawyer would do. And she was on the payroll of the City of San Francisco as a public defender.
As for the jury, it was the one Roman Catholic lady who voted for conviction. The homosexuals were the ones who voted to have me acquitted, and that is why I am not in jail today. Anyway, the Roman Catholic, “Pro-Life” lady came up to me after the trial and said, “Mr. Kopp, no more pipes.”
