Today everyone in HK compare the following news vs the event in the Philippines. The SWAT team in the US is much more well trained.
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Bullet ends Discovery Channel hostage crisis
Thursday, September 2, 2010
SILVER SPRING, Md. -- A hostage crisis at the Discovery Channel building ended Wednesday when police shot a man, who four hours earlier, took three people captive, brandishing a handgun and wearing what appeared to be silver canisters of explosives.
Police said no hostages were injured. The Washington Post reported that the gunman was killed.
The man, identified by The Associated Press as James J. Lee, stormed into the educational network's public lobby, a place frequented by parents and children drawn to see the 45-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex statue, around 1 p.m. Waving a handgun -- and possibly firing a shot, police say -- he took a security guard and two other employees hostage. As panicked employees rushed from the lobby, David Leavy, Discovery's vice president of communications, rushed down from his office to see what was happening.
"There was a lot of commotion," Leavy said. After a minute or two, they cleared the lobby, and Leavy and other executives huddled with security guards in a guard station nearby.
"We could see it unfolding on the security cameras," Leavy said.
He and other guards watched Lee force the hostages to lie face down. They couldn't identify the hostages, but they knew Lee from a protest he staged in front of the building in February 2008. Lee was arrested in that protest, and his picture was posted on the security guards' bulletin board, but "no one imagined this," Leavy said.
Lee's probation from that arrest ended two weeks ago, police said.
Leavy sent an emergency e-mail to employees, telling them to lock themselves in their offices. The first priority, he said, was evacuating dozens of children from the company's day care center inside the building.
Police and federal authorities arrived and ran into the silver-and-white office block as panicked children, then hundreds of employees, streamed out. Fewer than 10 employees, including Leavy, stayed behind to give law enforcement information about the building's layout.
Traci Drummond and Glen Yonkers were finishing lunch across the street from the Discovery building when they noticed people at the next table becoming agitated by a flurry of e-mails.
"They said their colleagues at the Discovery Channel saw a man loaded up with what looked like a bomb, and waving a gun, storm into their offices," Drummond said.
Dozens of police vehicles swarmed the area, cordoning off several blocks in each direction and emptying normally bustling streets between the building and a busy Metro rail stop.
Negotiators tried to get the man, who was arrested outside the Discovery building in 2008, to release the hostages, said Montgomery County police Chief J. Thomas Manger.
During the negotiations yesterday, he "exhibited a wide range of emotions," Manger said.
"Agitation, then calm, then agitation," Manger said. He hung up on police several times, but each time they were able to call back.
After four hours, the hostages, whom Lee had mostly ignored, began to move.
"I don't know if that's what agitated him," Manger said, but police believed, from the gunman's reaction, that the hostages' lives were in danger.
At 4:49 p.m., "the suspect was shot by police officers," Manger said. The shot came from inside the building, he said.
One canister he wore began to smoke, the chief said.
Lee initially survived the gunshot, which could be heard more than a block away.
Police took Lee into custody but kept the building locked down because Lee apparently stashed other canisters inside, Manger said.
"We believe we had him tracked the whole time," Manger said.
Employees are expected to return today, Leavy said.
As police evacuated the complex and word spread about the gunman, Drummond and Yonkers waited anxiously behind a police cordon until they saw friends who worked inside exit safely.
"We saw kids being evacuated" from a day care center inside, Yonkers said.
Drummond was working two years ago when she watched police arrest Lee for his 2008 protest.
"He was throwing money at people," Yonkers said.
Lee said then that he was angry the network wasn't doing enough to save the planet, Leavy said. He said at his trial that he began working to save the planet after being inspired by Vice President Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," and the Daniel Quinn novel "Ishmael."
"I don't think it's rational," Leavy said. He called Lee's complaints "ironic, since the whole company is built on celebrating the Earth."
[ Last edited by haroldla at 3-9-2010 20:26 ] | |
