It took only a second on Wednesday afternoon for Joe Johnson to shatter the window of a slate-green Honda Odyssey.

The driver’s-side middle window of the minivan, a junker owned by Hugo Auto & Truck Parts in Hugo, shattered on contact after Johnson tossed a 1-inch blunt-spiked metal ball at it.

“It’s just like throwing a dart at a dartboard,” Johnson said as he sifted through the broken glass inside the van with a long magnet to retrieve the metal ball. “If someone was in there, we could get them out in no time.”

Johnson invented the device – called a Shatterball – as a way to breach tempered auto-glass windows during emergencies. The Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 12,233,293 B2 on Feb. 25 for the “window breaking device having a generally orb shape with a plurality of points.”

The device, which weighs less than an ounce and is about the size of a quarter, is designed to be deployed by hand from a safe distance.

Johnson, 48, of Forest Lake, said he came up with the idea for Shatter Tactical, the company that makes Shatterball, while watching news coverage of civil unrest in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

“I was displaced due to the pandemic and had a lot of free time on my hands,” said Johnson, who previously ran a networking organization called Trust Vets.

“Every time I turned on the TV, I saw first responders trying to help people, trying to save people – whether it was the pandemic or civil unrest,” he said. “I decided to use my time to come up with a tool that would make their job a little easier.”

Shatterballs have been sold to law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and around the world, he said.

One major selling point: Shatterballs can be used to break glass and rescue people without putting officers “in danger of being cut by shards of glass,” he said.

In addition to being used as a rescue tool, Shatterball can be used as “a de-escalation tool,” he said.

“If someone is having a mental-health crisis, they don’t have to have an officer up there with both hands just pounding and swinging (a baton or hammer) and really exerting themselves,” he said. “I think that is worse for everyone involved. Everyone’s adrenaline gets going. With Shatterball, they can literally take five or 10 steps back and throw it and open that window and start the dialogue.”

Shatterball can also be used during traffic stops to “establish a line of sight,” he said. “If the windows are dark, and they can’t see inside the vehicle to see if they’re armed, they can open up the windows to make it safer for everyone.”

Officers stand from different distances, depending upon their throwing accuracy, he said.

“Our instructions are literally to throw it like you’re sticking a dart in a dartboard,” he said. “From whatever distance you can accurately throw the ball, it will work. Throwing it harder doesn’t make it work any better. You can even throw it underhand like a bean-bag toss in cornhole.”

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The metal balls – which retail two for $40 – are permanent and reusable. Officers deploying them can easily retrieve each Shatterball, re-holster them, and move on to the next call, he said.

Idea from dad’s junkyard

Johnson spent part of his childhood in Milltown, Wis., where his father, also named Joe Johnson, owned a junkyard.

“He had a trick where he would break a ceramic spark plug, and the little pieces of the spark plug would shatter car windows,” he said. “With tempered auto glass, you can throw rocks at them and baseballs and, you know, most everything is going to bounce off, but he would break it down and show us how this little piece of ceramic would shatter the car window super-easily.”

Johnson said he remembered that trick when he began designing Shatterball after years of “kicking around ideas.” “Over the years, I’ve had many different conversations about it,” he said. “At one point I did a patent search for it, probably about 15 years ago, and there was nothing out there. Once 2020 hit and I had that downtime, I committed to bringing it to life.”

Various prototypes of the Shatterball. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Johnson’s first prototype was made of ceramic and diamond dust without any spikes; his second one had 20 larger ceramic tips, but it was cost-prohibitive to manufacture, he said.

“The third was a full spiked silicon-carbide plastic ball that had probably about 100 points,” he said. “That would work about 80 percent of the time, but you had to throw it much harder.”

Johnson finally settled on a solid-steel model with 32 points.

“It does exactly what we hope to accomplish, and it works consistently, and it works extremely easily,” he said. “The density of the steel and the depth of the spikes are dialed in to interact specifically with tempered auto glass, so that it takes very little effort to shatter.”

Designers at Custom Mold and Design in Forest Lake helped Johnson come up with the final design. Shatterball is manufactured at a factory in Indiana, he said.

Game changer

Ryan Pankratz, who works in fugitive apprehension for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, joined Shatter Tactical shortly after seeing a Shatterball break a window for the first time in 2022 at the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Annual Executive Training Institute & Law Enforcement Expo in Duluth.

Joe Johnson, left, the inventor of the Shatterball, with Shatter Tactical co-owner Ryan Pankratz. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“As soon as I saw it, I knew it was a game changer,” said Pankratz, co-owner and director of sales. “It sells itself. I think once people see it in action, they see the videos or they hear about it and how easy it works, they’re like, ‘Is that magic?’ It’s not magic. It’s just innovation, as we get smarter in the profession.”

Shatterball is the “exact right weight and hardness,” Pankratz said. “It brings the right amount of velocity and transfers just the right amount of energy to break the window with ease. It’s the perfect recipe.”

Last May, a deputy with the Flagler County, Fla., Sheriff’s Department used a Shatterball to break the back passenger-side window of a car in a Walmart parking lot in Palm Coast, Fla., to rescue a toddler who had been locked inside on a sweltering day, he said.

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“We know that minutes, if not seconds, count in those situations,” he said. “Fumbling around trying to find something to break the window effectively is a problem.”

On Nov. 7, officers with the department used a Shatterball to gain entry to a car whose driver was unresponsive and appeared to be suffering from an unknown medical episode. “The vehicle was still mobile at the time, so Deputy Mark Rexford utilized his agency-issued Shatterballs to break a window to gain entry to the vehicle and get the driver medical attention,” according to a press release from the department. “Sgt. Gabe Fuentes and Deputy Rexford were able to remove the driver from the vehicle and get her medical treatment.”

The Flagler County Sheriff’s Department has deployed a Shatterball more than 20 times for rescues, and “it has worked every single time,” Pankratz said. “Knowing that the product we’re selling is making a difference in communities and protecting people — even if it saves just one person, it feels good.”

Sell themselves

Shatterballs have been purchased by a wide range of federal, state, county and local agencies, including the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, he said. They’ve been shipped to departments in Germany, Australia and Canada.

Joe Johnson, of Shatter Tactical, shows his invention, the Shatterball, during a demonstration at Hugo Auto & Truck Parts. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“At this point, the more we sell, the more we sell,” Johnson said. “If we sell it to a city department, then they’ll inevitably end up on a call of a vehicle accident or a situation where the county sheriff’s office is there as well, and then someone sees it from the other department, and then they want them.”

About 95 percent of Shatter Tactical’s orders ship directly to law enforcement agencies or fire departments.

“We are trying our level-best to keep these in the hands of first responders and not the general public,” he said. “What I don’t want to do is have them sold locally, at retail, so that, you know, people that have bad intentions can use them for that as well.”

Johnson and Pankratz monitor each sale and do Google searches on each potential buyer. “We do every order that comes in, and typically that’ll either pull up their first-responder credentials or a mug shot,” Johnson said. “If a mug shot, we refund the money. We’ve rejected several orders over the last year, just based on the fact that it’s someone in the community that we would prefer not have these.”

Said Pankratz: “If somebody is going to go out of their way and spend the money on Shatterball, I would caution them that we retain all records, and we will always comply with law enforcement requests as to anybody that purchases Shatterball.”

Shatter Tactical’s next product will be a Shatterball with a 6-inch fire-proof strap attached. It’s designed for firefighters who must wear thick fireproof gloves and would not be able to throw a Shatterball with any precision, Johnson said.

“With this, they can keep their gloves on,” he said. “They can just grab the ball by the strap and throw the whole thing or they could hold it in their hand and break the windows – however they want to do it.”

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Johnson also hopes to design a product that could be worn with a lanyard that EMS and ambulance crews could use. “So if they’re traveling to a vehicle accident, they can just throw it around their neck and have it with them if they need it,” he said.

Pankratz and Johnson each keep a set of Shatterballs in their vehicles in the event they ever come across someone who needs help.

Johnson also has outfitted his 19-year-old daughter, who has a set in her car and in her purse, he said.

“If she ever gets in the wrong back seat, she can get out,” he said. “It’s a good safety tool to have because it works from inside or outside. We don’t market them that way, but I feel better knowing that she has them. You see terrible stories on the news, and I would rather her have the option of getting out of any vehicle she’s in the back seat of.”