Copyright Washington Post; Reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library Prince George's County police Cpl. Mike Landrum, center, holds would-be assassin Arthur Bremer in a headlock as he and other officers take him into custody following the shooting of Wallace May 15, 1972 in Laurel.

Detective Archie Cook stood in the parking lot of the Laurel Shopping Center 30 years ago today with two-dozen other law officers and an energized crowd of nearly 2,000 people.

George Wallace, then-governor of Alabama and a Democratic presidential candidate was in town to deliver a speech the day before the state presidential primary.

Cook, then 32 and a seven-year veteran of the Laurel Police Department, and his partner, Milan Shegan, had been assigned to guard Wallace's limousine while the candidate spoke.

They were told to watch for trouble. Trouble found them.

"They expected possibly hecklers ­ maybe eggs ­ that type of thing," said Cook during a recent interview.

Instead, there were gunshots, and the governor was hit four times.

"In my 30 years of law enforcement, certainly when you have something that made history and you had a presidential candidate here and something like that happens, it is something you don't forget," said Cook, who retired as Laurel police chief in 1994 and now lives by a golf course in Pennsylvania.

The 50-minute speech Wallace delivered that day in Laurel did not go down in the annals of American politics as one of his most noteworthy addresses. News accounts even note the candidate referred several times to "Princess George County."

But witnesses remember the crowd cheering heartily as Wallace, 52, finished. And, although the security plan called for him to walk directly to his car parked to the right of the stage, the governor instead turned left to greet supporters.

The last steps Wallace would take were in the wrong direction.

As Wallace moved among the cheering spectators, then-28-year-old Prince George's County police officer Cpl. Mike Landrum said a man wearing a red, white and blue shirt and sporting a large Wallace button called out, "Hey George, over here!"

The man, later identified as Arthur Herman Bremer of Milwaukee, extended his arm through the crowd. The .38-caliber revolver in his hand fired five times.

One of the bullets struck Secret Service agent Nick Zarvos in the neck, and his blood splattered on Landrum as he twisted back and fell.

Four other bullets hit Wallace, who immediately collapsed to the pavement.

"I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, not here,'" Landrum said. "I just went in the direction of the gun."

In the crowd, Landrum was wrestling against Bremer and a frenzy of onlookers who seemed bent on revenge. Someone had already tackled Bremer and Landrum put him in a headlock.

Landrum kept his grip around Bremer's head and pushed through the angry crowd for about 60 yards to an empty police cruiser.

Bremer was bloody from the blows he had taken from those who tried to get at him before the police could take him away.

"We had quite a fight on our hands," Landrum recalled.

The officers had just loaded Wallace into the back of a station wagon they had commandeered and prepared to take him to the hospital themselves when the ambulances arrived.

"Literally, when we got there, they just threw him in the ambulance," Fiedler said. "It was kind of like everything was crazy."

In all, 14 people crammed into the ambulance, a Chevrolet Suburban Carryall, with Wallace for his emergency trip to Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, said Fiedler, now a career lieutenant with the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service.

Interstate 95 had just been completed in 1972 and the ambulance made the trip in about 12 minutes.

At the hospital, 20-year-old medical technician Mike Hall was starting his first shift of night duty in the emergency room when he heard the governor was coming.

When the ambulance arrived, Hall said, the Secret Service closed Holy Cross to any other ambulances. The seventh floor ­ where the intensive care unit was located ­ was declared off-limits.

Hall assessed Wallace's vital signs.

"He was not at death's door," Hall said. "He did have some critical injuries, obviously."

Elissa Mulligan, then a nurse in the cardiac care unit, remembered the rush of activity that followed Wallace's arrival. A heart-attack patient was being treated in an adjacent room, Mulligan said, and Secret Service agents tried in vain to control the staff.

"We nearly sent them out of their minds because they would try to stop people from going in and out [of the room] and nobody was stopping," said Mulligan, who is now a supervisor with the hospital's quality improvement office.

Hall, now the hospital's spokesman, recalled watching Cornelia Wallace, the governor's wife, as the neurosurgeon prepared her husband for surgery.

She was sitting on a bed in a white dress, holding her husband's personal belongings in her lap. The doctor was pricking his legs with a needle to see if he retained any feeling. The governor wasn't responding.

"I remember she kept yelling to him, 'George, let them know that you can feel that!'" Hall said. "She kind of feared the worst and the doctors, without saying anything, kind of looked at her."

Wallace was in a great deal of pain after the surgery and was heavily sedated, but his aides made sure he knew the trip to Maryland had been successful ­ Wallace won the state primary.

"They woke him up just to tell him good news," Hall said.

All four people shot by Bremer survived. Wallace would spend 54 days at Holy Cross Hospital and did not win the Democratic nomination that summer. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota won but lost the general election by a landslide to President Richard Nixon, who would resign in 1974.

under threat of impeachment for his role in the Watergate scandal.

When the Wallace campaign arrived in Laurel, the staunch segregationist was more a threat to the Democratic Party than an ally, said Keith Olsen, a history professor at the University of Maryland.

Wallace's history of opposing civil rights legislation and integration had severed the unity of the party between the more liberal northern Democrats and the conservative southern wing of the party.

"What you saw in 1972 was Wallace running very well in the primary until he came to Laurel," Olsen said. "The shooting helped McGovern get the nomination, because Wallace was not in the race."

Wallace was elected to two more terms as governor of Alabama, but his final attempt at the presidency failed when he lost the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination to another southerner ­ Jimmy Carter.

Wallace, who never walked again, died in Montgomery, Ala., in 1998 at the age of 79.

Bremer was tried and convicted in Upper Marlboro in August 1972 on attempted murder and weapons charges.

Although he never took the stand in his defense, Bremer did make a statement at his sentencing.

"Well, Mr. [Arthur] Marshall, [then-State's Attorney for Prince George's County], mentioned that he would like society to be protected from someone like me," Bremer told Circuit Court Judge Ralph Powers. "Looking back on my life, I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself. That's all that I have to say at this time."

Powers then sentenced Bremer to 53 years in prison.

Today, Bremer is housed in the Maryland Correctional Facility in Hagerstown and is not scheduled for release until 2025, when he will be 74 years old.

Bremer, through state prison officials, declined a Gazette request to be interviewed for this article.

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Staff writer Alexander Krughoff contributed to this article.