July 6, 2007
SALT LAKE CITY An armed man who dashed into a house Friday was fatally shot by an officer while holding a hostage around the neck, police said.
The man refused to drop his gun and shouted that he wanted to die rather than return to prison, said Detective Jeff Bedard, a Salt Lake City police spokesman.
No one else was hurt.
“I heard no more than one gunshot, so they took him out pretty quick,” said Jayme Chilberti, 53, who moved in across the street a week ago and watched from her porch. “I hope this isn’t a regular occurrence in my neighborhood.”
The man, whose name was not released, used a gun to try to steal a couple’s car around 12:20 p.m. MDT, but the driver resisted, Bedard said.
He ran a few blocks and entered a house on Green Street 25 minutes later, taking a man and woman hostage, Bedard said. The male hostage eventually escaped.
Police spent 30 minutes trying to coax the man to release the woman and surrender, but he repeatedly refused, Bedard said.
Officers surrounding the home could see him with an arm around her neck and a handgun pointed to her head, the detective said.
“At some point one of our officers had a clear shot at the suspect ... hit the suspect in the head and the suspect died,” Bedard said.
The man was shot while standing near a doorway at the rear of the home, his arm still around the woman’s neck, Bedard said.
Nicky Pearson and husband Cory Taft were alerted by a neighbor that a man with a gun was skulking about Green Street, which is two rows of bungalows divided by a sidewalk. She hurried to her house, where her granddaughters, ages 10 and 11, were alone.
They watched from a window as a police SWAT team arrived and began negotiations.
“We’d move away from the window for a minute, but it was too tempting to look out and see what was going on,” Pearson, 61, said.
