HELD HOSTAGE IN SACRAMENTO : Glass Door Slams on Deputies’ Rescue Attempt : Siege: A sniper’s bullet is deflected, giving gunman a temporary reprieve--and a chance to shoot hostages.

A heavy glass door that slammed shut a split-second too soon, deflecting a sniper’s bullet, turned a precisely planned rescue into chaos and triggered a melee that had police storming from the rear with weapons firing and a gunman methodically shooting victims one by one.

As law enforcement officials and freed hostages reconstructed Friday the final terrifying moments of their confrontation with four angry gunmen the day before, the swinging of a door seemed to be the pivotal event that determined the fate of the people inside the Good Guys electronics store in south Sacramento.

It was a finale neither the gunmen nor the authorities had planned.

As tense negotiations began to break down in the early evening hours, each side prepared for their final move. Infuriated by what they believed was the failure of police to take them seriously, the gunmen took steps to carry through with their threats to systematically murder the 40 hostages trapped inside the store.

They flipped coins to determine the exact order of death; who would be first and who would be last. Grabbing plastic telephone cords from the wall, they tied the hostages together in groups of three and four and lined them up in the front of the store.

“That’s when it started to get pretty crazy,” recalled hostage David Risse. “Around this time they were telling us they were going to shoot somebody.”

At the same time, sheriff’s deputies, sensing too that the end was near, found an opening in the roof that allowed seven deputies to drop into a storage room at the rear of the store. In the meantime, two police snipers were stationed in the parking lot at the front of the store and given orders to shoot whenever they had a clear bead on any of the gunmen.

The moment for both sides came at 9:54 p.m. The glass door in front of the store slowly opened and a young woman on a tether held by a gunman crawled out toward a bulletproof vest. The vest had been left earlier by deputies in a failed attempt to trade it for hostages.

As she painstakingly crept toward the vest and out of harm’s way, the sniper took aim and fired.

“He did not hit the suspect,” said Sacramento County Sheriff Glen Craig. “The door, which was very thick plate glass, deflected the bullet.”

For the sheriff’s deputies crouched in the rear storage room, the sound of gunfire and the shattering of glass was the prearranged signal for them to move.

They rushed forward. At the same moment, one of the gunmen turned on the hostages and began firing, abandoning the order of death that had been determined earlier.

Television cameras trained on the front door picked up his shadowy image moving down the line of hostages, methodically squeezing off shot after shot.

Alan Story, 37, one of those lined up, said later that the sound of glass shattering had also been a signal of sorts to the hostages. They knew instinctively that it meant the final showdown had come.

“Everybody yelled and headed for cover because we realized it was going down,” he said. “We . . . fell to the floor but they had us tied up in groups of three to four . . . (and) when you’re in a group you can’t separate. So we all hit the floor and just laid down hoping we were going to miss the bullets.”

A deeply religious man, Story remembered praying silently to himself, “God, I’m in your hands and you’re in control. If you’re ready for me to go home, I’ll go home. If not, then your will be done.”

David Seigler, 27, said it happened so fast that his only memory was of shattering glass and a lot of people suddenly in the room.

“It was pretty confusing,” he said. “Shattering glass and gunfire everywhere.”

With their attention riveted on the hostages, Craig said the gunmen did not hear the sheriff’s deputies moving in from the rear until they were almost upon them. He said the deputies shot them before they could return fire.

In the minutes it had taken the deputies to move toward the front, the gunmen had time to kill three hostages and wound nine others. Story was wounded in the chest and Seigler in the hip. Both were listed in good condition Friday. Two other hostages had been wounded before officers decided to storm the building.

Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino contributed to this story.