dragonlady7

So, this is a follow-up to this post about the armed standoff down the street, which I had to post on livejournal rather than via my usual MT route because I couldn't remember the URL to update the MT blog, and couldn't get to my computer. (It's currently set up on a chair in the corner of the bedroom Dave is using, because the bedroom I am using has, and I do not lie, no grounded outlets. Yessirree. Wiring hasn't been redone since about 1945. Yow.)

Anyhow. So. To sum up, I woke up this morning and looked out the window of the aforementioned quaint little bedroom, and found myself staring at the bumper of a Buffalo Police Dep't cruiser. Huh, I said to myself, and rolled over and went back to sleep.
Finally, around 9, I woke up and got out of bed and went into the living room. Sure enough, I could see that a police car was idling just at the end of the neighbor's driveway, blocking off the street and directing traffic down the side street. Hm.
Eventually Dave came down, clad in underpants and a towel, and we stood in the bay window of the living room peering out at the car and watching the traffic get redirected. Dave seemed to enjoy being in his underpants during all this hubbub, but I finally opened the front door so I could look better, and that was a little too much of the spotlight for him. So he went and put clothes on, and then went out and asked the policeman what was going on.
"There's some guy holed up in his house a block down, with a gun," the cop said with a shrug. "They're trying to negotiate."
"Huh," Dave said, and came back inside.
In a little while, News 4 showed up and set up a camera under the tree on Dave's mom's front lawn. The skies opened and it began pouring, which kept the onlookers down a bit. One of Channel 4's reporters showed up, some dude named Mylous that Dave recognized immediately. We put raincoats on and went and stood on the front porch. There was a SWAT van there (er, down the street, not on the porch). Weird, we said.
We went and stood under the tree, and the cameraman asked us why oh why didn't we have a second story porch?
"I ask myself that every day," I said.
"Well," Mylous said, "the trees'd block the view anyway."
"True," the cameraman said. "Your trees are too healthy in this neighborhood." (Background: In Buffalo, about half the houses are these massive old '20s era beauties with second-story porches. The other half are single-story godawful ranch houses. Dave's mom's is a particularly well-improved version of the latter, and is actually one of the nicest houses I've been in-- but modest.)

So we stood there and got soaked. "At least it's not snowing," Mylous said with some rueful humor, and the cameraman kind of grimaced and nodded. TV news types in Buffalo deal with some pretty foul weather.

Eventually we went inside. Channel 7 showed up and interviewed the nutjob next door, Bobby, a harmless 40something eccentric who seldom wears a shirt. (Bobby informed us later that he'd declined to give his name because he's "paranoid".)
We noticed that Channel 4 had their antenna up, and Mylous had put down his umbrella, so we turned on the TV and there he was, reporting! So we got some more details.
Apparently at around 8:30ish in the morning, the neighbor noticed that 75-year-old retired priest Father McGrath was in his yard with a rifle. So the neighbor called the cops and News 4, naturally.
The cops showed up, the guy holed himself up in his house and threatened to shoot people (apparently his initial gripe was with utility workers, who I think he thought were out to get him). So, over the next 4 or 5 hours, they had the bishop talk to him, they had his buddies talk to him, they had his personal attorney talk with him, they had hostage negotiators talk with him, etc. There was a SWAT team. There was all kinds o' cop equipment that they was usin' up, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie. Channel 2 showed up after the Channel 4 broadcast (I guess they don't have such a good info-collecting network, so they just watch Channel 4 like the rest of us...) Dave and I were filmed as stock footage of concerned neighbors by Channel 4. Bobby was interviewed by Channel 7. The people across the street with the beagle were interviewed by Channel 4. And the lady from Channel 2 interviewed me and Dave when she overheard us on the porch saying "Man, nothing's happened for hours. Armed standoffs are lame." But they didn't use us on the show.
Dave also got interviewed by one of the local radio stations. Saying, "We dunno, we never met the guy, but if he was gonna shoot somebody he probably would've already." More or less.

But finally an official-looking dude in a three-piece suit holding a manila folder came striding down the street, and all the cameras converged on him. Dave went over and stood in the crowd to hear what he said.

In the end.... I'm going to make you click the cut to read what happened.

In the end it turns out that the poor fella had eventually become too distraught to respond to anyone, had stopped answering the phone or the door, and so the police had finally broken the door and gone in with the SWAT team and everything.
They found the guy, and he was all right. They took him to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.
They found the "rifle."

It was a BB gun.

So, in the end. they're probably not going to press charges against the poor old fellow. He just cracked, that's all, and he didn't intend to hurt anybody. He didn't, at any rate.

So, it's all good, and this little section of North Buffalo just got its little bit of excitement.

Mind you, there was a drug raid down the other end of the street in the wee hours of the morning, but we thought perhaps we wouldn't think about that, just now at least. I dunno what the neighborhood is coming to.

... At the moment, it is half past midnight and the next-door neighbors are having a loud and rowdy game of what sounds like Dungeons and Dragons. I repeat, what is this neighborhood coming to??

Good thing I'm moving next week. (A block away.) (Shh.)