Suspects holed up for hours surrender to Modesto police

Two suspects believed to have fired shots from a car early Monday afternoon near Carver Road and Ninth Street surrendered about five hours later on High Street just north of Scenic Drive.

The men were in custody about 5 p.m. – roughly 45 minutes after members of a SWAT team entered and cleared a neighboring home in the 100 block of High Street. When the team came back out of the home, a law enforcement officer made an announcement over a loudspeaker imploring the suspects to come out of the adjacent fourplex with their hands up. The men eventually emerged.

The incident began about noon when someone fired shots from a green car near Carver and Ninth. It’s unclear at whom the shots were fired, but no one was injured, said Modesto police spokeswoman Heather Graves.

A traffic officer chased the green vehicle north on Carver, then east on Orangeburg Avenue through the McHenry Avenue intersection. Officers briefly lost sight of those in the vehicle but learned they’d abandoned the vehicle at High Street and Cedar Avenue, west of the cemetery on Scenic Drive.

Modesto police officers, with the assistance of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol, set up a large perimeter – south to Scenic, east to the cemetery, north to East Morris Avenue and west to Semple Street.

They went door to door searching for the people from the vehicle until all their efforts were directed toward a fourplex in the 100 block of High Street, where a resident reported finding a cellphone believed to belong to one of them. The cellphone was sitting next to a window screen under a broken window on her upstairs neighbor’s balcony.

“I picked it up ... it was vibrating and I could see messages were coming in. … I opened it up and there was a message saying … ‘They are looking for you in a green Honda,’” said resident Terri Murray. “That’s when I got scared, thinking they were in our apartment and they had guns. I ran back downstairs and locked myself in my apartment, came out the front door so I could let the police know I found his phone.”

The Sheriff’s Department and Modesto police had SWAT teams surround the fourplex and call out the other residents using a loudspeaker. Then, for two hours, they called for the suspects to come out. Finally, the men emerged from the back of the fourplex with their hands in the air.

After the arrests, the perimeter was narrowed to the alley between High and Kimble streets, where officers searched for evidence.

Earlier, John Muir School, which had been on lockdown, was let out with police on scene. The Modesto Senior Center on Bodem Street also had been evacuated.

Shortly after the pursuit went through the area, Modesto resident Patriot Roberts, 72, found a gun along the route at Kearney and Orangeburg avenues.

He’d been at the Kearney post office and was driving home when what looked like a gun caught his eye, so he stopped. “I’m nosy, but I want to serve my community,” he said. “It was laying right there, and I didn’t know what had happened. ... There was nobody around there.”

He has no cellphone, so he could not simply stay with the gun and call police with his location. “I was being careful not to leave it there. ... Some kids could have picked up the gun and ‘bam, bam bam.’”

He said he carried the gun by its trigger guard so as not to smudge any fingerprints and called the police when he got home.

Police came to his home and took a DNA swab from the inside of his cheek. They also took the gun.

Dozens of law enforcement personnel – SWAT officers, K-9 officers, patrol officers, undercover officers with the Stanislaus Auto Theft Task Force, detectives and the sheriff’s air unit – took part in the manhunt. For a period of time, Modesto police were operating under “condition yellow,” which means the only other calls they would respond to were emergencies, Graves said. Sheriff’s deputies and Ceres officers assisted during this time by responding to some of Modesto’s calls.

Police set up a central command station on High Street near Cedar Street, where the vehicle believed to have been involved in the chase was found.

“We’d rather be proactive than reactive,” Graves said when asked about the large law enforcement presence.

Traffic around Scenic Drive was moving slowly as people tapped their brakes to catch a glimpse of the police presence. There was at least one rear-end accident on Scenic and several other near misses.

The names of the suspects and the charges they face were not available Monday evening.

This story was originally published April 27, 2015 at 1:40 PM with the headline "Suspects holed up for hours surrender to Modesto police."