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(Updated) An allegedly armed man fleeing police burst into an Orchard Street house Tuesday afternoon and into a second-floor apartment — where he grabbed a 9‑year-old girl who was speaking on a cell phone with her grandmother.
Thus began a tense standoff between police and the fleeing man, a standoff that caught little children in the middle.
The incident began when a Lt. Holly Wasilewski tried to stop a Lincoln in the Hill, according to police spokesman Officer Dave Hartman. Wasilewski had information that the man in the car had drugs and a handgun.
Wasilewski spotted the car on Redfield Street, Hartmand said. Cops stopped the car on Columbus Avenue, but the driver hit the gas when cops ordered him out of the car, Hartman said. They noticed there was a woman in the car with the man.
The driver engaged police in pursuit to County Street. The man bailed out of the car, ran through backyards, then into the three-family house on Orchard Street between Goffe and Dickerman.
It was around 5 p.m.
The fleeing man, known as “Stuttering David,” ran through the house’s open front door. Then he apparently locked it and ran to the second floor, where he encountered the 9‑year-old girl, Nyquasia. Her mom identified her and gave her permission to speak with press at the scene.
The man “grabbed me,” Nyquasia said later. “He picked me up and grabbed me like he was my dad or something.”
“I was scared,” she said. “I was crying.” She thought she saw a gun in the man’s pocket. He didn’t brandish it.
Stuttering David took Nyquasia to the third floor, where four more children and an adult woman were in the apartment.
Stuttering David offered the woman money to hide there, according to Nyquasia, a third-grader at Elm City College Prep.
“She [the woman] said, ‘Get out!’ She was like, ‘No! No!”
The man ran alone back to the second floor, locked himself inside the apartment.
Meanwhile, cops tried to kick in the back door, but weren’t able to, Hartman said. “They got in the front and began their search for [the suspect] and simultaneous evacuation of the other apartments. The third-floor apartment door was opened by a small child. Officer James Murcko went inside and found five crying children between the ages of 5 and 10. They were in the care of a 32 year old woman … who was shaking and crying. The Officer didn’t want to risk moving them from the building, so he brought them into a rear bedroom and turned on the television for the kids.”
Three cops, their guns drawn, came up to the third floor to escort the children outside, Nyquasia said.
At 5:15, cops were surrounding the building, their guns drawn. Lt. Ray Hassett, head of the department’s SWAT and negotiation teams, headed inside with two other cops, including Sgt. Richard Miller. The cops had word that Stuttering David had a gun.
They went to the second floor and began negotiating with the man through the locked door.
The negotiations took 25 to 30 minutes. Police didn’t know if others were inside the apartment. “He was the only voice,” Hassett said.
“During negotiations he said he had a knife,” Miller said later.
The man said he needed to have his sister on the scene. And he wanted a guarantee the cops wouldn’t beat him, Miller said.
The cops brought the sister to the scene. She spoke from outside the house by way of a speakerphone outside the apartment door.
“He just wanted to be reassured,” Hassett said. “She was echoing our request to give up peacefully.”
The man came out and surrendered shortly before 6 p.m. He was alone.
He wasn’t stuttering, Miller said.
He also didn’t appear to have a weapon on him. The police commenced looking for it, in the apartment and in neighboring yards.
“There was a knife that he may have used,” Hassett said. It was a kitchen knife, he said.
Hartman said that the woman who had been in the Lincoln had told the driver to pull over. She “told Officers she’d seen Lt. Wasilewski following [the car]. She knew the Hill neighborhood’s top cop and told [the driver] she knew “Holly” and that he’d be OK with her. She said [driver] didn’t stop, and that she told him she wanted to get out. He wouldn’t stop the car, but as he slowed down to take a turn, she opened the door, tucked her body, and rolled out of the car. She said she wasn’t hurt, and said she was thankful no other cars were there to run over her.”
Nyquasia’s mother had been outside the house when the standoff occurred. She saw Stuttering David — who lives in the Westville Manor projects and whom she said she knows — run into the house. She called him “a friend.”
“I’m nervous,” the mother, who declined to be named, said later. “I’m just worried about him coming back to my house.”
For now the man is in police custody.
The man, who’s 31, will face “a host of charges” including home invasion and kidnapping, Hassett said.
On Wednesday, Hartman listed the charges: “Home invasion, two counts of Kidnapping in the second degree, Burglary in the second degree, two counts of Reckless endangerment in the first degree, five counts of Risk of injury to a minor, Interfering with Police Officers, Reckless Driving, Engaging Officers in a pursuit and Operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license.”