Dewey County, Oklahoma, Sheriff Clay Sander is seen here with his family, wife Callee and daughters Kyah, 4, and Kamee, 2.  He has spent the last two weeks recovering from his injuries from a gun battle with Oklahoma fugitive Michael Dale Vance. 

DEWEY COUNTY, Okla. — Clay Sander isn’t just a heroic figure who survived being shot twice in a blazing gun-battle with Oklahoma murderer and fugitive Michael Dale Vance. 

The husband, father and Dewey County Sheriff is more than the guy whose cool head and determined mentality — despite his wounds and injuries — allowed Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers to locate the fugitive and put an end to Vance’s reign of terror. 

Sander is a survivor.

The showdown

Since October 23rd, it was nothing new for Sander to get a call about a Vance sighting in the surrounding counties.

Vance, who quickly gained national media attention, had so far eluded a statewide manhunt after police say he murdered his aunt and uncle and shot two Wellston, Oklahoma, police officers after a gun battle and had shot another person while stealing a vehicle. 

In the morning after his initial rampage, Monday, October 24th, a local farmer reported that he had run into a man he thought was Vance parked in front of a gate to his ranch property.

From that point, the numbers of supposed sightings in Western and Northwestern Oklahoma of the fugitive only increased, keeping Sander and his fellow sheriffs from nearby counties working long hours. 

After making some phone calls that afternoon and then traveling to what is now known to be Vance’s campsite where he hid out for most of the week of October 24th, Sander knew this was real. They were closing in on their suspect. 

At that point, all available members of law enforcement were again dispatched to the area to try and hunt Vance down. 

Sander said while he was on high alert, he was looking for the last known vehicle Vance was said to be driving — a silver Mitsubishi Eclipse — not a farm pickup truck. 

“The chain he was dragging was arcing into the bar-ditch,” he said. “I thought, he’s going to start a fire and we are going to have the fire department out in the middle of the manhunt and that can’t be good…He was running 45 to 50 miles per hour, just typical — driving like a farmer would — not racing by or anything that drew any attention. And as soon as I turned my lights on, he immediately pulled over and stopped.”

That was when everything for Sander changed.

“As I pulled over and was getting closer to him, I called in on the radio to say where I was at, but I wasn’t close enough to see the tag yet. As I got close enough to see the tag, I went to radio that in and I saw the door open to his pickup and the barrel of the rifle came out and he just opened up. So I ducked down, over the console, behind the dash.”

Vance was standing outside of his stolen farm truck, aggressively firing an AK-47 directly into Sander’s vehicle. 

In a flash, under a cascade of bullets and without being able to see where he was going, Sander hugged his body close to where he knew the engine block was situated and slid his hand up onto the steering wheel and placed the vehicle in reverse to at least get some distance.

“While I was backing up, the first shot was to my shoulder and I felt it,” he said. “And, my first shooting (in 2007) my hearing — I didn’t hear anything. But this one — I heard it. I felt it, I saw it and I thought ‘Oh this is getting bad.’ So then the second one hit my elbow because my arm was up on the steering wheel, trying to drive backwards. I said, ‘Well, this isn’t going to work. It’s fight time.'”

Sander’s county issued AR-15 was sitting next to him in the passenger seat.

“So as I am looking up, things sort of slow down. So I could see the bullets going through the windshield with the trails of glass following them,” he said. “My AR was setting in the passenger seat. So I grabbed it and stuck it up on the dash and fired a round off and then opened the door and got out and engaged him.”

At this point, Vance attempted to get back into the stolen flatbed farm truck. 

“He was standing right outside his door for my fist shot. The second shot, he had gotten back into the pickup and was shooting around the door jam. And probably the worst things was, I knew I had put some kill shots on him, but my rifle wasn’t strong enough to go through the headache rack, through the cab, through the seat to him.”

The wounded Sander changed his aim and began firing through the glass of the pickup, trying for a head or neck shot.

“And that’s when he took off,” Sander said. 

Some kind of miracle 

In all, Sander’s Tahoe is thought to have at least 27 shots fired through it. 

On the top of Sander’s head, just a little to the right, is a wound that is now scabbing over. It looks suspiciously like a bullet just grazed the top of his head, though he prefers to think of it as a cut from flying glass.

According to Sander, who wore a bulletproof vest during the shootout, there were two bullet holes through the hat he was wearing that night. 

“We practice for those type of things and train for these type of things and one thing I always teach is the warrior mentality,” Sander said. “I know I am going to live through every situation and I am damn sure going to fight to make sure that happens. I know people who don’t have that mindset and I don’t think they should be in law enforcement. I never questioned if I was going to get killed. It was, I need to do something to change the way this fight i[s] going.”

 Life after

Nearly a month later, after spending a little more than a week at an area medical center for two wounds in his shoulder and elbow from Vance’s AK-47 shot, Sander and his family can reflect on the trauma of last month’s events the family is doing its best to work through together.

“It has definitely changed things around here for a while. You know,” Sander’s wife, Callee, said. “It has even kind of changed things up for our girls too. They are having a hard time adjusting. They (usually) go out with their daddy on the Ranger feeding cattle – he usually was the one to take them to school and day care and he helped with baths and bedtime. We had our own little routine. Just a lot of our everyday routine has changed.”

In the days that have passed, the family is trying to spend time together and get their lives back into something that resembles normalcy for the family. It is a process, Callee Sander said. But little by little, the family is adjusting.  

“My worries right now are about them,” Clay Sander said of his family, looking at his wife curled up in a recliner next to him at his home. “My first phone call was to her [following the shooting] because I figured she would hear about before I could get to her and I wanted her to hear it from me.”

Sander’s passion for home and his family as well as a relationship with his deputies — one that can only be described as a brotherhood, is what really defines the man.

Sander expects to be back in the sheriff’s office, at least for light duty, sometime this week.

Van Horn writes for the Woodward, Oklahoma News.