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Traffic stop ends in standoff: State police shoot man with bean bag after incident
By Jennifer Kavanaugh
Sunday, April 16, 2006



SOUTHBOROUGH -- A dramatic standoff between Massachusetts State Police and a gun-toting man on Interstate 495 southbound shut down both sides of the highway for about an hour yesterday, until troopers shot the man with "less lethal" munitions and took him into custody.


With I-495 becoming a parking lot, uniformed troopers, officers with police dogs, crisis negotiators and members of the state’s Special Tactics and Operations team, or STOP, converged around the landscaped median, just south of the Simarano Drive Exit 23C. After an almost hour-long confrontation, the man was shot with what one police official at the scene described as a beanbag round.


Police had not released the man’s identity as of deadline last night, but State Police Sgt. Scott Range said the man was conscious after he was shot and was taken to University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. He said he didn’t know where the man had been hit. No one else at the scene was hurt, he said, and no regular bullets had been fired.


Police said they retrieved two firearms from the man at the scene and that charges were pending.


The incident started around 4:50 p.m., when a state trooper pulled over a southbound Chevrolet because it was speeding and following another vehicle too closely, Range said last night.


"At some point, the male occupant began walking away from the vehicles southbound," Range said. "He failed to comply with the trooper’s verbal commands, and at some point the trooper observed a firearm that he had."


The trooper called for backup, and police shut down the southbound lanes, where the man was walking around in the middle of the road. They soon shut down the northbound lanes, where traffic had slowed to a crawl anyway, as drivers hit the brakes to watch a man in a white hat and white jacket wandering in circles, and the troopers who were aiming guns at him from the median.


Some drivers got out of their cars, while people who could bailed off the highway at the Simarano Drive exit, with many cars getting lost in the tangle of roads that wind through the area’s industrial parks.

Police officers from the surrounding towns patrolled the streets that run parallel to and pass under 495 near the Marlborough-Southborough border, to prevent spectators from sneaking through the woods to get a front-row view, or stand in spots where they could get shot in the cross fire.
That didn’t stop people from trying to get a better look. On Johnson Road in Southborough, some spectators found a grassy hill that offered a direct view of the man and the troopers through a chain-link fence and a clearing. A police officer urged them down from the hill for their safety, and within the next minute, a loud boom rang out from the highway, just a few feet away.
At about 6 p.m., police reopened the highway, though traffic moved slowly for a while because of the backup, and as people tried to look at police and at members of the news media who had lined up along the side of the road.

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Posted by: mpd61

Where was the WCSD Command Vehicle? CMPSA roll for this one either? what's the story?

Nice to see the MSP and Locals getting it done together!

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Posted by: MSP75

Why did they have to hit him with a bean bag. Couldn't they have offered him a popsicle instead? Where is Jesse? Where is the ACLU? Heee! Heee! Heeee!

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