SWAT Team Shoots Man to Death After Standoff

OXNARD — An Oxnard man was shot and killed by members of a police SWAT team outside his home Monday evening after a four-hour standoff following a call about a domestic dispute.

At about 2 p.m. police were called to the unidentified man’s residence, in the 100 block of Frank Avenue, by his wife.

“When one of the officers was approaching the house, the suspect came out and brandished a handgun,” said Senior Officer Tom Chronister of the Oxnard Police Department.

Police called in the special weapons and tactics group and formed a perimeter around the block, Chronister said, while the man’s wife and younger teenage son fled the small stucco house to the parking lot of a nearby McDonald’s restaurant on Saviers Road.

“He had another son in the house,” Chronister said. “It does not seem that he was a hostage. He was there on his own.”

The man, who was in his late 40s or early 50s, and his older teenage son took turns talking with a police conflict-negotiating team on the telephone throughout the standoff.

However, witnesses said the man’s behavior became increasingly bizarre, as he began packing his firearms into an old, white pickup truck and taunting police, at one point climbing a palm tree in his yard to leer at the officers.

“He was making faces to the cops, but he wasn’t waving a gun at them,” said 22-year-old neighbor Josh Ruiz, who said he was an acquaintance of the man’s older son through a vocational internship program. “He was loading up his truck with handguns and rifles.”

Chronister said the events leading up to the SWAT team shooting the man were unclear.

“At about 6:30 p.m. the suspect came out, and for unknown reasons some bean bag rounds were fired,” Chronister said.

Witnesses at the scene reported hearing two dull thuds of the police shotguns loaded with nonlethal bean bag rounds followed by the load report, which is thought to have come from the fatal bullet.

SWAT team members were being debriefed at Oxnard Police headquarters late Monday night to determine what prompted them to shoot the suspect, Chronister said. He added that the man had no other criminal history, except for a few past calls to police to settle domestic disputes.