Refuge found in Fairchild Air Force Base rampage

The shots rang out. In the midst of calm, terror took its place. But where would one run in the heart of chaos?

“Everyone else is running away and we’re running into it,” now retired Highway State Patrolman Bill Dingfield says as he thinks back to that day at the Spokane Fairchild Air Force Base hospital. “I remember trying to get people into the ambulances and all the time we’re out in the open and expecting someone to start shooting.”

Only minutes before, Bill and his trooper partner had been bantering about birthday plans – Bill celebrating the evening with his wife, Ruth, and Sergeant Lee Boling watching his teen son blow out candles.

But the emergency call to the horrific June 20,1994 massacre just outside the gates of the base left them both knowing there might not be birthday parties, but funerals instead.

“Bill called me from his cell phone,” Ruth recalls with clarity her husband speeding to the scene. “He said, ‘I might not be able to contact you,’” and then added a plea she still remembers to this day, words that became her mission minute by minute while the story unfolded on the local news.

Fear heightened when word came that one gunman had been shot outside the Emergency Room and might be at large. Even worse, inside the medical center – or on the roof – there was thought to be another shooter, perhaps in military gear.

“We’re trying to control the people, all the time looking to see where the other shooter was,” reflects Bill on the frenzied scene that hot summer day. “You saw all these people running around with guns, but you didn’t know who were the good guys and the bad guys,” he says about some in military uniform and some who were not.

All the while in the line of fire from the upper story, the patrolman assisted medics as they rushed to save lives. At one point, Bill worked his way over to a severely injured man he’d been asked to help, staying there for over an hour, crouched low and with only his vehicle as protection.

The man Bill had been guarding – and who died at the scene – turned out to be the lone gunman, disgruntled about his psychological discharge from the service. He took the lives of four and injured 23 others in the melee.

“I was praying for both my sergeant and myself that we’d make it home that night,” Bill, who now lives in Kennewick, openly admits about his faith.

And throughout that tragic day, Ruth had not forgotten her husband’s urgent plea: “Pray for me.”

In that tumultuous time when life was out of their control and evil sought to overshadow hope, Bill and Ruth Dingfield knew where to find refuge. They both ran to Jesus.

”The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” Psalm 18:2 (NIV)

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This story was originally published January 4, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Refuge found in Fairchild Air Force Base rampage."