SAN JOSE — Mitch Ellerd finished his UPS delivery route on Communications Hill one afternoon last month and realized it was still early enough to spend what was left of Valentine’s Day with his wife and kids.
But instead of being at home with his family, he found himself captive inside his own delivery truck, sitting next to a shotgun-toting parolee who was rambling about dying and taking Ellerd down with him.
“He had started stressing out about his daughter, and how he’s not going to let his daughter be part of this,” Ellerd said recently. “And he had looked right at me and it was the one and only time he had done this. He had looked over at me and he said, ‘This is why I’m not going back.’ ”
Then, Ellerd said, the man looked at him and said, “Today we die.”
Ellerd gave his harrowing account of that afternoon’s events in his first public remarks about the ordeal, an interview that aired Wednesday on ABC7, this news organization’s media partner.
Not long after telling his family he would be home early, he was confronted by a man and a woman who were fleeing from the police and had already fired several shotgun rounds at Santa Clara County Sheriff’s deputies who were pursuing them.
“She had come up too,” Ellerd said of the woman, “and he had gotten close, and he told me, he said, ‘I’m telling you. You’re going to get me out of here and you’re going to get me out of here now!’
After it was all over, Ellerd would be lauded by San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia as a hero, with the chief crediting Ellerd’s quick thinking in helping thwart the escape of the suspects, who had carjacked him at gunpoint and forced him to serve as their getaway driver. The male suspect, 33-year-old Saratoga resident Mark Morasky, was shot and killed by a police officer
“He definitely saved lives, including his own,” Garcia said of Ellerd the day after the hijacking.
Joanna Mae Macy-Rodgers, 23, the surviving suspect, remains in custody at the Elmwood women’s jail, where she is being held without bail on charges that include four felony counts of attempted murder of a police officer.The charges come with enhancements for using a firearm and one felony count each of carjacking, kidnapping, taking a hostage, and evading police.
According to police, on the afternoon of Feb. 14, Morasky and Macy-Rodgers fled the Chynoweth light-rail station in South San Jose to avoid plainclothes transit officers with the Sheriff’s Office, who approached the pair’s black SUV to issue a citation for illegal parking.
During the initial pursuit through city streets and eventually onto highways 85 and 87, police say Macy-Rodgers fired once at a Sheriff’s minivan and then three more times at the minivan and other law-enforcement vehicles, hitting one. The suspects then made their way to Communications Hill and unfortunately, to Ellerd, as well.
“They were very direct, like there was going to be an issue,” Ellerd told ABC7. “So I just said ‘You know what, guy?’ I just turned and I said, ‘You know what? Just take the truck.’ ”
“When I turned back, there it was, right in my face,” he said, referring to Morasky pointing a gun at him.
“I told him, I go, ‘Hey, there’s cops everywhere.’ And he told me to pull over and they’ll drive right by,” Ellerd said, adding that in the moment, neither of them was aware they were already being watched by a police helicopter.
“When I started to make the right-hand turn to get onto the freeway, I was going to jump out of the truck,” Ellerd said. “When I started making the turn, I had reached over with my left hand and I was trying to unbuckle my seat belt.”
He added, referring to Morasky, “Well, he caught me, and he got pretty upset. Very upset.”
Ellerd said Morasky kept a grip on his seat belt after that escape attempt, and he quickly understood the gravity of the situation from the sight of police cars following them.
“When I saw that many officers behind me, it was kind of like, I’m in trouble,” Ellerd said in the TV interview. “Because I figured this guy did something pretty bad.”
He confirmed what police had said, that he kept the truck’s speed to around 50 mph so that police could keep pace, convincing his captors that the truck had a regulating device that prevented it from going faster and purposely driving into road spikes laid across Highway 87 by the police to disable his truck.
At North First Street and West Trimble Road they stopped, and a standoff ensued, police said. Soon after, Macy-Rodgers exited the truck and surrendered. In his brief phone contact with police, Morasky talked about not wanting to go back to prison, and said that “he was going to die that day,” according to court records. Morasky was on parole after serving four years in prison for a 2012 carjacking and two robberies in San Jose and Saratoga.
Ellerd recalled that Morasky gave him the same grim message in the truck. He was released by Morasky around 7 p.m., when the suspect, after initially trying to get the UPS truck to move again, tried to make a run for it, in a sequence partially captured by television cameras.
A San Jose police officer then fired a single shot that hit and killed Morasky as he ran “toward officers and civilians” while carrying the shotgun, police said. The officer who opened fire has since been identified as 12-year police veteran Nicholas Bronte.
Ellerd offered a simple answer to explain his thinking in the moments after he was commandeered at gunpoint.
“I figured as long as we were driving, we’re okay,” he said. “We’re okay for now.”
