BRYAN, Texas — After 17 years along the train tracks outside of historic Downtown Bryan, the folks at George’s Auto Glass don’t see many firsts.
“This is the first one, this is the start,” Konner Garrett, the general manager of the shop explained as he looked at the newly installed windshield on a College Station Police Tahoe.
“There’s been so much we’ve had to learn.”
The family-owned business, which dates back to the early 2000s, had to learn a few new lessons over the past few weeks after they received the first bullet-resistant windshield for the patrol cars.
The glass comes to the shop from donations to Operation Safe Shield, a local non-profit that aims to equip all law enforcement vehicles in the Brazos Valley with this technology.
“It’s been a very exciting opportunity,” Garrett said.
“It’s been great, it’s been fun,” his dad, Silas Garrett Jr. followed.
The father-son duo put the finishing touches on the first windshield, inspecting it and only had one more thing left to do: “We still have to clean it, it’s still pretty dirty” Konner said.
The folks at George’s Auto Glass are the only glass shop in the area certified by the Auto Glass Safety Council.
That means they had to go through extensive training to receive certification to install these ballistic windows.
“It is a lot of work,” Konner said.
“There's a lot of logistics and challenges that go into making just a standard car fit a bulletproof windshield, but at the end of the day, if it can save one officer's life, it's worth it.”
The windshield weighs almost 200 pounds while a regular one weighs about 30.
The glass the Garretts are installing could have saved officers like DPS Trooper Chad Walker’s, who died near Mexia just over a year ago after being shot through his windshield while on duty.
“The more we can do, the better off we are,” Silas Jr. said.
Because in that garage in Bryan, firsts are just the beginning.
“We don’t want to fall behind in Brazos County,” Silas Jr. said. “We want to be a leader in the state for whatever we do.”
They hope this is just the first of many windshields to go into a police car in the area.
Along with Operation Safe Shield, they hope to equip all seven county’s police forces with bullet-resistant glass.