GREENFIELD — Police prepared for a long night with a man who barricaded himself in a barn on the east side of Greenfield Saturday afternoon and kept SWAT officers at bay for hours.
At 10 p.m., the man was still holed up in the pole barn on a property along Jaycie Phelps Road. The drama began around noon, when police responded to a call of a person barricaded in the barn. Repeated attempts to get the man to come out — first with negotiations and then with tear gas — were fruitless. At one point, officers scattered when shots rang out.
Police had been in contact with the man, who was not immediately identified.
SWAT officers fired two rounds of tear gas into the barn starting about 2 p.m. At 3 p.m., as they were preparing a third round of tear gas, shots could be heard coming from the barn, and officers could be seen running through an adjacent field.
Capt. Robert Harris, public information officer for the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department, said the shots came from inside the two-story structure. A reporter and others who had gathered several hundred feet away from the barn but still within sight of it were told to quickly move away.
Before they began firing tear gas into the building, officers had repeatedly asked the person inside to come out with his hands up, using a bullhorn that could be heard several hundred feet away.
Residents of the nearby Keystone subdivision told the Daily Reporter that had trouble getting to their homes because of the SWAT situation nearby.
The Daily Reporter’s Kristy Deer is reporting on this story; this is the last update until Sunday morning.
