(WWJ) A barricaded gunman, who police say “tortured” a hostage throughout the evening, was killed during a nine-hour stand-off.
Police said the man 42, held his girlfriend at gunpoint at a home on Concord near Van Dyke and Nevada Ave. on Friday.
Police Chief James Craig told WWJ a special response team was called in, and negotiations started almost immediately.
He described the terror the woman endured.
Craig said she was “extremely fearful;” she mentioned multiple times to investigators that she “did not want to die like this.”
“The officer could see clearly (she) was facing her own mortality,” he said. “He had her on the ground… the officers could clearly see he had a weapon pointed at the hostage.”
He told reporters that officers tried multiple times to communicate with the man throughout the night. At one point, they called upon his family to talk to him.
“We also used the media, where his mother gave an interview. We believe he was monitoring local newscasts, just trying to get him to come out,” Craig said. “But that effort was also unsuccessful.”
The subject became increasingly agitated and violent throughout the night, according to Craig. Eventually, the man stopped communicating with officers. For a time, he allowed the victim to communicate with police on speaker phone.
“You could hear on the phone, explaining how she (the victim) knew she was about to meet her Maker. At one point, he had her calling her children to tell them goodbye,” Commander Darren Szilagyi said.
When officers tried to establish a rapport with her by asking her holiday plans, she responded: “My plan is to be dead,” according to Szilagyi
About 9 hours after the stand-off began, Craig said; a Detroit police sniper, fearing for the woman’s life, fired a single shot. It hit the man. The woman later told officers the subject had a gun pointed to her back at that time.
He was taken to the hospital, where he died about an hour later; according to police.
Craig said the man suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar depression. He had been off his medication for at least two days.
It’s a situation police are seeing all too often.
Detroit Police have responded to nearly two dozen barricaded gunman situations in the past year, about half of them involving a subject with mental illness; Craig said.
“We’re criminalizing the mentally ill because we are not proactively treating them,” Craig said. “We know who in our neighborhood, who in our community is suffering. What is being done to help them, to make sure they take their medication and are being treated?”
He added many families don’t have proper resources to turn to.
“The families, they’re handcuffed,” Craig said. “They have nowhere to go.”
Police were able to rescue the woman and get her out of the house. Her condition is not known, but police did not mention any injuries.
“My heart goes out to the hostage,” Szilagyi said.
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