Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005 | 9:38 a.m.
A Metro Police standoff came to a violent end Monday afternoon as an officer shot and killed a man who had held his mother and brother hostage for more than seven hours.
Officers on Monday evening were still investigating the confrontation, which began about 5:15 a.m. when police responded to a report of a loud argument and a man breaking windows at the Mark Twain apartments in the 900 block of East Twain Avenue near Cambridge Street, Capt. James Dillon of Metro's robbery-homicide section said.
When officers approached the apartment, the man, whose name was not released, barricaded himself inside, threatening to harm his mother and brother, who were also inside, Sgt. Chris Jones, a Metro spokesman, said.
The man then repeatedly attacked his mother, who appeared to officers looking through a window to have been beaten. He later threatened to attack her with a knife, at which point officers swarmed the apartment and shot the man a little after 2 p.m.
"SWAT officers determined he was attacking his mother and he was shot and killed," Dillon said.
Once inside, officers found at least one knife but no firearms, Dillon said.
Whether the man's mother was stabbed was unclear Monday afternoon, although she was taken to University Medical Center in serious condition that afternoon. Her condition, along with that of the man's brother, was unknown this morning.
Their names were not released.
Pursuant to department policy, the name of the officer who shot the man was not released Monday. The officer was on administrative leave this morning pending a hearing by the department's use-of-force board.
The standoff led to the evacuation of at least seven other apartments as officers began what would be a lengthy negotiation process, Jones said.
Margaret Crossland, a retiree who has lived near the first-floor apartment where the standoff started for almost five years, said she did not know her neighbors well, but saw the woman she knew as "Fran" pass her apartment everyday on her bike.
Crossland said she did not know about what was happening downstairs until she took her pet Chihuahua for a walk Monday morning. That's when Crossland said she was told to evacuate by a Metro officer.
"I hear the sirens all the time, but I don't think anything of them," she said of her noisy neighborhood. "It's kind of scary that this would happen."
Shirley Ann Schulz, a retired jazz singer who described her age as "over 65 by quite a bit," said she evacuated her second-floor apartment after hearing an explosion from a police device designed to distract the man in the underneath apartment.
Schulz, who has lived at the Mark Twain apartments for four years, said she did not know her downstairs neighbors but that the once-quiet complex had "gone downhill" since she moved in.
"I don't think they screen," she said of the complex's management. "If you have the money you're in."
The incident was enough for Schulz, who said she used to perform at the Sands hotel, to reconsider continuing to live in Las Vegas.
At the very least, she said she would step up her plans to move to the southwest valley.
"I used to just love it but the last few years it's grown so fast," Schulz said. "You used to feel safe. It's not the same town."
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