A person was shot in the buttocks in the 3100 block of Omaha Street in Middletown at 8:38 p.m. Thursday, touching off an hours-long standoff after the suspect refused to leave his house. The shooting victim suffered a non-life-threatening injury, and the suspect was taken into custody early Friday without further incident.
Police said they quickly identified the shooting suspect, but he would not come out of the residence, according to FOX19. That refusal escalated what began as a shooting investigation into a full SWAT standoff overnight, with officers surrounding the house as they worked to bring the situation to a safe end.
Drones and SWAT Officers Surround the House
Drones were deployed during the standoff as SWAT officers took up positions around the property, the station reports. The tactics are typically used to monitor a barricaded suspect without putting officers in the line of sight, and in this case the approach appears to have worked without anyone else getting hurt.
The standoff ended early Friday when the suspect was taken into custody without further incident, per the same account. He was arrested on a felonious assault charge, police say, though his name was not immediately available. A low-confidence detail in the report describes him as an 18-year-old man, but that identification has not been independently confirmed.
Officers Report No Injuries
Police said all officers involved in the standoff were okay once the suspect was in custody. Beyond the non-life-threatening injury to the shooting victim, no further details about the circumstances of the shooting, the relationship between the parties, or the exact residence involved have been released.
This is not the first time a Middletown standoff has drawn out SWAT resources this year. In late June, Middletown police and a SWAT team spent hours surrounding a home near Woodlawn Avenue and Baltimore Street, only for officers to find no one inside once the standoff ended past midnight, according to the Journal-News. Thursday night's standoff, by contrast, ended with an arrest.
