Last weekend I was babysitting for some good friends of mine, Tom and Gretchen. Their four-year-old daughter's name is Honora. Tom was at a Christmas party and Gretchen had a car waiting to take her to where Tom was. Not two minutes after I arrive at their house, Gretchen recieves a phone call from her neighbor, Heather. Gretchen is upstairs and all I hear from her end of the conversation is "What?! Oh my gosh! All the windows and doors are locked here...do you think we should all hide upstairs?" And she rushes downstairs to where Honora and I are and she's double-checking the locks and I'm like, "What is going on?" And then she ushers me into the other room so as not to frighten Honora, and tells me that her neighbor just saw four undercover cops rush into the woods right next to Gretchen's house with their rifles drawn! So we look out the front window and there are at least ten police cars and more down the street that we can't even see, and SWAT's there. And I literally drove down that street right before this all went down, so I'm glad I got there when I did. So we're watching out the window and waiting for her neighbor to call and update us, because she's listening to her police scanner and komo 4's website. Gretchen calls the driver to let him know that she doesn't want to leave me with her daughter until she knows exactly what's going on. Not to mention she doesn't really want to leave the house when the police are out there looking for someone!
We wait for about an hour and her neighbor keeps calling us with news. At first she says there's a hostage situation, but she's only speculating because SWAT's there. And apparently Heather was calling everyone in the neighborhood to figure out what everyone knew. So there was also a rumor that the wife at this house was injured somehow and they suspected her husband but he insisted he wasn't home, and that's why they were out searching the woods, because they suspected an intruder. But then they thought the husband was acting suspicious. And then her neighbor says someone's been shot and they caught the guy. By then we can see they're wrapping up, so Gretchen decides to go talk to the police herself before she heads out, just to make sure it's safe and figure out what really happened. So she runs out there and comes back shortly and here's what the SWAT guy had to tell her...someone fell and they weren't sure the situation was contained...what does that even mean?! We weren't sure, but they said it was safe so Gretchen left and that was that.
I babysat for them again last night and got the whole story. In a house just down the street a husband was on the third floor working at his computer, his wife was on the second floor decorating their Christmas tree, and their two boys (one age 8 and the other younger I think) were in the basement playing video games. All of a sudden the boys hear a big crash and popping sounds from upstairs, so they exit the house through the basement and run immediately to their neighbor's house, as they've been instructed to do in situations such as these, and tell their neighbor's that they heard gunshots in their house. The neighbors immediately dial 911. Meanwhile, back in the house the husband also hears the noise and rushes downstairs to find his wife seriously injured and bleeding all over. She had fallen and landed on a bunch of the glass decorations and was cut and bleeding pretty bad. The husband sees their boys at the neighbor's house and decides to leave them while he rushes his wife to the emergency room. While the husband is on his way to the hospital, the police arrive. They search the house only to find the bloody mess they left behind, and immediately jump to the conclusion that the husband has killed his wife and left to hide the body somewhere, hence the search in the woods. The husband heads home to check on his sons and finds his house surrounded by cops and they immediately try to arrest him and question him of course. He manages to explain the situation and all was well. So it was true what the SWAT guy told Gretchen: someone fell and they weren't sure the situation was contained.
