WASHINGTON (WUSA9) -- The woman who was once legal guardian to the man police say is responsible for a shootout outside Prince George's County police headquarters tells WUSA9 he called her days before it happened.
Hyacinth Tucker says Michael Ford said he needed to sit down and talk, but that failed to set off alarms then. Tucker told Ford she was busy and asked him to give her a couple of days.
She's not sure he would have told her what he was planning, but Tucker sure wishes he'd given her a chance to stop the attack.
“I was shocked,” the Hyattsville businesswoman said. “I would not imagine that Mike or his brothers would do something like what I saw reported on the news.”
Tucker said she first met Michael Ford when his mother kicked him out of her home at age 16. “I said, 'Are you going to be ok?' And he said, 'Yeah, I'll be ok.' And I said, 'Do you need anything?' And he said, 'Well, we haven't eaten.'”
Ford was a friend of Tucker’s son and she ended up appointed his legal guardian. She knew he suffered from mental illness, but she never saw it. “It was like, 'Hey, Ms. Tucker, I got a job here.' 'Hey, Ms. Tucker, I'm starting school here.' He would call me with all the positive things that were going on,” she said.
She says his tone was only slightly different when he called her late last week. “And he was like 'I really need to sit down and talk to you.' And I really didn't think anything of it, to say 'Well why?... You need to talk to me now, or let me drop... it didn't seem that alarming.'”
It was just days before police say Michael Ford and his brothers went to the District Three station so Michael could commit what police call "suicide by cop."
“I don't know what would have happened, what he would have said to me. But yes, I do wish I'd had the opportunity to talk to him on Friday,” Tucker said.
Tucker has no idea why his brothers would have gone with him and recorded the attack on their cell phones. “I really can't see why anyone would want a video of your brother being gunned down, if that was the plan.”
WUSA9's Bruce Leshan asked Hyacinth Tucker whether she thought Malik and Elijah Ford, Michael's brothers, might have recorded their brother shooting in hopes of winning social media fame and fortune. She paused for a long time, and then said that she couldn't conceive of that at her age but she says she has no idea what might be going through the minds of 18 and 21 year olds.
