The suspect was barricaded inside a home on West Galer Street for more than eight hours before shooting himself in the chest. Part of the street was closed, and buses were rerouted because of the police response, which included a SWAT team and bomb squad.
A more than eight-hour police standoff ended Monday afternoon when a robbery suspect shot himself in the chest, inflicting a life-threatening injury.
The man had barricaded himself in a basement apartment below an antique store in Queen Anne after police tried to serve a warrant around 6 a.m.
The police response, which included a SWAT team and a bomb-squad vehicle, closed West Galer Street between Third Avenue West and Fifth Avenue West.
The road was expected to be closed for several more hours, police said at about 3 p.m.
The man, still conscious and breathing, was wheeled out on a gurney about 2:20 p.m. and treated by Seattle Fire Department medics before being taken to Harborview Medical Center.
On Tuesday morning, hospital spokeswoman Susan Gregg said the man had been upgraded from critical to serious condition and was in the hospital’s intensive-care unit.
The man was being served a search warrant in connection with an alleged robbery that happened in March, Seattle Police Detective Patrick Michaud said.
As the standoff’s eighth hour approached, police used three flash-bangs to get the suspect’s attention so he would keep talking to officers.
“You need to get off the phone and let negotiators get ahold of you,” police said through a megaphone.
They then sent in a camera to check on the suspect, and SWAT team members entered and found the man down, Michaud said.
A teenage boy, whom police initially said was the suspect’s adult son, was escorted away from the home, uninjured, at about 8 a.m.
That left the suspect as the only person in the home, Michaud said.
Neighbor Antoaneta Georgieva, who lives about half a block from the site of the standoff, said she awoke around 6:30 a.m. to the sounds of police activity.
“In my sleep, I heard police say, ‘Come out with your hands up.’ I heard a grenade — an explosion. They (police) told me it was a stun grenade,” she said.
That pattern, of shouting and bang noises, repeated two or three times, she said.
East Queen Anne resident Steve Harris saw the commotion while he was on his way to the gym Monday morning and heard police say, “We know you’re in there. We can see you with the flashlight. Come out.”
“He (the officer) said that, like, three times. Then there was a flash and a bang,” Harris said.
Christina Hickman, a graduate student at Antioch University, lives directly behind the building where the man was. She said police told her and the woman who lives below her that they couldn’t stay in their units.
“I was told not to go into my apartment because it faces north,” Hickman said.
Police used the lower neighbor’s second-floor apartment as a vantage point, Hickman said.
It was Sasha Larosa’s first day working full time at Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, whose storefront was just beyond the police tape.
“It’s a very weird first day. We have our doors open, but no one came in,” she said.
Top Pot Doughnuts, on the same block as Molly Moon’s, served coffee to the police officers “to power them through,” Top Pot employee Jasmine Jermyn said.
Buses were rerouted around the scene.