A man attempting to rob a check-cashing store in Irving, Texas, had his robbery thwarted when an employee triggered the alarm. Police quickly responded to the robbery in progress, and the handgun-armed robber decided to take a hostage.

This turned out to be the worst decision of his day, and the last decision of his life.

The officers simply could not let the armed robber leave the scene with his hostage.

One of the Irving Police officers on the scene retrieved his patrol rifle out of the back of his SUV and posted up alongside his vehicle (red arrow, above). The officer braced against if for stability took aim at the hostage taker’s head (green circle, above), remembered his sight offset, exhaled, and “solved the problem.”

DallasNews.com has the details:

Officers responded around 1 p.m. to an armed robbery in-progress at the Cash Store near SH-183 and Esters Road. An employee inside the store had triggered the alarm, said Irving police spokesman James McLellan.

When police arrived, the robbery suspect took a female employee hostage and walked outside with her. He told the officers that he would hurt the employee if they approached him, McLellan said.

The suspect, who has not been identified, threatened to put the woman inside a vehicle. Police did not say whose vehicle it was. The officers then shot the man, who was armed with a handgun.

The two officers will be placed on routine administrative leave. McLellan called them “heroes.”

“The two officers were here quickly, within minutes and were able to engage the suspect,” he said. “They couldn’t let him leave with the hostage … By all appearances this was the last resort for them.”

The female hostage was unharmed.

It is because of situations like this that patrol rifles—typically AR-15s—have earned their keep in increasing number of law enforcement agencies nationwide. The police aren’t “militarizing” as some unschooled nitwits like to claim, they’re simply apply the right tool for the job, which in many instances requires a precision aimed shot from moderate distance with little chance of overpenetration.