A Police Standoff....In My Front Yard

Saturday around noon, my husband and I were making lunch in our kitchen, when I happened to peek innocently through the blinds to see if it was still raining, or if we could put up some Christmas lights.

Upon looking out the window, I could do nothing but yell "holy crap!" and my husband ran to the window. This is what greeted us out our front window:

Four cop cars directly in front of our neighbor's house, one (not pictured) almost in front of our driveway, and we suspected more down the street, blocking traffic the other way.

After the initial shock, we ran to our bedroom window and the window in our garage to see if we could figure out what the heck was going on. Annnnddd, we saw cops with sniper rifles, oh fun!

(cop leaning over the back of the blue Mini, with gun trained on the house two doors down)

After about a half hour or so of wondering what could be going on, just when we were beginning to get bored, this white van arrived, which we thought was maybe a SWAT team. They had a police dog too, so we wondered if maybe drugs were involved.

Crime scene tape....

The guys in the white van were decked out in full gear, so we knew they were planning on doing something big.

They did an initial approach to the house two down from us by foot, with just two officers.

I don't know what those two guys saw, but it must have been something (or nothing, and they were just being cautious), because then this armored black van pulled up, and a whole crowd of officers in full gear conferred at the end of the street.

We definitely thought something was going to go down soon, because these guys set up shop kitty corner to our house, with sniper rifles pointed at our neighbor's house in question. Boy, were we glad that we'd never met these neighbors!

About, oh, 2 1/2 hours into the standoff, with us posted up in our kitchen being lookie-loos, the armored van started driving down the street and toward the house.

The van got into place directly in front of our neighbor's house two down from us, confirming that that was the house they were interested in, and positioned the van so that the front of it was facing the front of the house.

They then proceeded to plead with "Jim" to come out of the house. This went on for about 15 minutes or so, with them repeating the same things like, "It's going to be alright, we just want to talk, etc." If you turn up the sound, you can even hear them in this video I took from our side garage window.

The whole time they were on the loudspeaker, the guys across the street were waiting for something to happen.

However, after a while, when "Jim" still didn't come out, the van drove back down to the end of the street, I guess so everyone could regroup, or come up with a plan B. They hung out down there for a while, then returned in the armored van, this time pulling up right in front of my next door neighbor's house.

There, they took some time gearing up and gathering stuff from the back of the van, before approaching the house.

Short video of them walking up to the house in full gear, with guns drawn:

We waited, and waited, fully expecting to hear gun shots and see someone drug away in hand cuffs. We were just sitting there, wondering how the heck this was happening in our quiet little neighborhood, but after a while, the cops came out shaking their heads.....nothing.

They must have radioed down to the rest of the group at the end of the street, because two animal control officers came running, and took away two dogs briefly, but brought them back about ten minutes later. We were guessing they just wanted the dogs contained so they could check out the empty house, because it seemed like "Jim" had already escaped.

After much standing in the road and talking, the armored van finally packed up and drove away. A few police officers remained, tying up paperwork, we assumed. We quickly lost interest, after all, we'd wasted all afternoon looking out our window, without much payoff, since we didn't get to see the bad guy brought to justice.

So yeah, that was our Saturday afternoon. Definitely not a normal occurrance where we live! And until this morning, we still thought it was just a matter of the guy escaping before the police got there. But I finally found a news article that explains it all (sorry, I'm not going to cite which local newspaper this is from because the article lists our street and I'm paranoid like that).

"Police, SWAT team members and crisis negotiators surrounded a XXX home Saturday after receiving reports that a man was threatening to kill himself, police said. Hours later, they found him dead inside from an apparent suicide.

The 61-year-old man's wife and adult stepson called police at about 11:15 a.m. saying they had fled the home on the XXX block of XXX because they had seen the man loading a gun.

"He was despondent, he was acting suicidal, he was threatening to kill himself and they had seen him loading a revolver," Wylie said.

The man had "quite a few" weapons registered to him, Wylie said, so police did not enter his home immediately.

Crisis negotiators tried to reach the man through his cell phone and home phone lines, but couldn't get through, Wylie said. A SWAT team was called in and crisis negotiators tried using a public address system. Police blocked off the street in front of the home and evacuated neighbors in four nearby houses.

Eventually, police borrowed a camera-equipped robot from the Department of Public Safety and sent it into the home. The robot found the man in the garage, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, Wylie said. He was pronounced dead at 3:51 p.m.

Wylie said the man may have already been dead when police arrived. Neighbors, as well as the man's wife and stepson, said they did not hear any gunshots. Neither did police who arrived on the scene."

Crazy, right?