"I was off-duty that day, in my driveway working on a car. I heard gunshots and sirens and I heard radio traffic about someone destroying buildings." He would soon realize that he was going to have to spend his relaxing day off in a much less relaxing supervillain tank battle. After arriving on the scene, he started recording video, because handcuffs and mace are notably ineffective against 50-ton armored vehicles. This is not the sort of thing local police train for.
Patrick Brower was also there that day. He was at work at a local newspaper when the Killdozer came to killdoze his office. Most of the staff evacuated, which is the smart call when someone is barreling toward you in a massive artisanal tank. But Brower and one of his co-workers stayed to cover the rampage. "Suddenly the bulldozer goes in front of our office, makes a sharp right turn, and I watch the front wall of our office crumble only ten feet away from my very body at that time. So I was inside the building when he hit it. I like to tell people if I had tripped, I might have died, but luckily I didn't trip and we quickly ran out the back ... "
This office wasn't a random target. Brower and his paper had beef with Heemeyer going back years. But we'll get to that. Brower next heard gunshots, the sound of local cops ineffectually trying to shoot the thing, figuring they might as well try. They hit it 200 times without so much as annoying the tank or the man inside. There were no windows, only a series of video cameras hooked to monitors in the cockpit, the cameras themselves shielded by three inches of bulletproof glass. Heemeyer had spent months, maybe more than a year, building this rumbling juggernaut of vengeance.