Confirmation from Seattle Police Department spokesperson Renee Witt this morning that last night’s standoff was the result of good acting:
Witness reported that he had seen a man and a woman pointing guns at each other inside an apartment. Officers responded and determined that the subjects were in unit —. Patrol officers formed a team and positioned themselves so that they could observe the apartment. People could be heard arguing inside, and at one point someone said, “ow, jeez, stop it.” and “go ahead and shoot me.” Once the apartment was contained, ACT officers took over the tactical aspect, and established voice contact with the occupants. Three people came out of the apartment and were taken into custody. Officers swept the apartment and found a fourth person inside the bedroom, on a bed. She was taken into custody without incident. Investigation revealed that the four subjects were filming themselves as part of a school project. Three guns were located and determined to be false. All four subjects were investigated and released at the scene.
School project? Hmmm. The Stranger Hump! 5’s submission deadline is only two months away.
This was us. We were rehearsing for a performance this weekend and after our first run through, we noticed a police car outside and wondered if somebody had mistaken our rubber red-tipped prop gun for a real one. We spent a few minutes looking outside to see what was going on and when they didn’t seem to be looking up at us and started investigating something down the road (who we later found out was the witness that spotted us), we figured it was for someone else and closed the last 6 inches of our blinds so as not to freak out the cops who were outside.
Imagine our surprise when during the final scene of our final rehearsal runthrough before the show, we were called out of the apartment to find a huge team of cops hiding behind ramming shields and pointing shotguns at us. It’s kind of scary reading what they heard from outside because none of those lines (especially “come on in and shoot us”) are in the script, so we were all glad things didn’t get ugly.
I’m glad everything turned out fine. You could definitely hear tension in the chatter from the scanner archive but there were also cooler heads who kept things calm and mostly orderly it seems. What show were you guys rehearsing for?
We were rehearsing for Spam*O*Rama ( http://www.porkfilled.com/) this weekend, so if you see it, know that we went through some crazy stuff to give you a good show. :)
Oh, to clarify we’re the guest act, Killer Donut, not Pork Filled Players (the hosts). Didn’t want to slander the fine, upstanding members of PFP by implying they cause police standoffs.