Sharpshooter Hailed As Hero For Freeing Girl From Abductor

Sharpshooter Jim Main didn’t even realize he was pulling the trigger on the shot that saved a 7-year-old girl’s life until the bullet was fired and Kristina Jacobson was running from the overturned car where she had been held hostage.

Minutes earlier, the Douglas County sheriff’s deputy had to sit up and take deep breaths to regain his composure. But then he settled back into the bubble of intense concentration that he has trained thousands of hours to achieve.

“When I actually pulled the trigger, just a split second before I had seen Kristina lean back and part of her chest,” Main said Tuesday. “As his face came down, I followed it with the cross hairs in the middle of his face.

“I saw the little girl moving and put another round in the rifle and she just squirted out of the car instantly and started running.”

Main was the hero of the hour last Thursday when he fired the single shot to the head that killed Lance Sterling Alexander, 25, of Salem. Alexander had kidnapped Kristina from a Salem day-care home and driven 100 miles down Interstate 5, shooting at people in other vehicles along the way.

Reared in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Main is 51, married, the father of two grown sons and grandfather of a baby girl. A veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, he has been with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department for 11 years and a member of the department’s tactical team since it formed seven years ago.

He had fired half a million rounds at targets before making the shot that took one life and saved another. It was the first time throughout his military and police career that he ever had to shoot anyone.

Main lay there a half-hour, listening to Alexander’s threats and Kristina’s fears as they talked to a hostage negotiator over a police radio.

From the time they arrived, the sharpshooters had the green light to shoot Alexander. The gunman was acting erratically, like he was on drugs, and was threatening to kill his hostage.

Alexander had sexually abused baby sitter Chantiell Thomas and fired a gun at her before taking Kristina hostage in Thomas’ car, police report.

Main looks forward to meeting Kristina, who has said she wants to thank him. He regards Thomas as the real hero of the day, because she did what she had to do to keep the children in her care alive, and marveled at the courage of the other police officers who rushed the car after his shot.

“Somewhere deep inside, I know I will be dealing with this, thinking about this for the rest of my life,” Main said.