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The call came in around 6 p.m.: A man was holding a woman hostage inside an Edgewood Avenue apartment with red curtains in the front window.
So reported the unidentified woman on the phone.
A half-dozen cops rushed to scene, a brick apartment building next to the Coin-Op Washing & Dry at Edgewood and Hotchkiss in the Edgewood neighborhood.
The tense incident, which drew a crowd of onlookers, occurred Monday evening.
Cops sealed off the alleyway on which some of the complex’s apartments, including the one with the reported hostage, open.
Two leaders of the city police SWAT team, Sgt. Pete Moller and Lt. Thaddeus Reddish, arrived, seeking to determine if they needed to call in a hostage negotiator. They interviewed neighbors. Then a woman emerged from the apartment with the red curtains.
Reddish recalled what happened next:
“Are you OK?” the police asked the woman. “Were you being held hostage.”
No, she replied.
They asked who was in the apartment. “Just my brother,” she said.
At that point, Reddish recalled, “we just don’t know what’s going on. Is there another female being held? Was [the first woman] being sent out to get supplies?” They asked the woman to remain on-site. Then officers went inside to knock on the apartment door.
A man answered the door. The cops looked inside — and saw a second man. Both men appeared to be in their late teens or early 20s.
The cops asked the men for identification. The second man said he didn’t have any. He gave a name.
Reddish recognized the man. The name didn’t sound right. He pushed the man to tell the truth. He admitted he’d given a false name and gave his real one.
“Why didn’t you tell us that from the start?” Reddish asked.
“I have warrants,” he responded.
The police checked; indeed, the man was wanted for drug crimes. They arrested him. They also arrested the woman outside, who besides being the sister of one of the men inside the apartment, turned out to be the girlfriend of the suspect with the warrants.
That ended up being the root of the problem. No one was being held hostage. Instead, a lover’s spat was at play.
The police called back the phone number of the unidentified woman who originally made the 911 call about the hostage situation. She admitted that she invented the ruse in order to sic the cops on the man with the warrants — who is her ex-boyfriend and the father of her child. She didn’t like that he was now hanging around with the new girlfriend.
The episode kept the cops busy for over an hour.
Paul Bass File Photo
Lt. Reddish.
“It was tense,” Reddish said. “They’re telling you it’s a hostage situation. You can’t leave an area until you verify. Is it true? Is it not true? Someone’s life depends on it.”
Besides the man with the warrants, police arrested the new girlfriend on interfering charges, according to Reddish. They didn’t arrest the ex-girlfriend who made the original call, he said; even though the call was a ruse, it did contain a legitimate complaint that led to an arrest.