Man taken from home after standoff, near-suicide

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Orange and Brown
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Man taken from home after standoff, near-suicide

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WRITTEN BY ATHENS NEWS STAFF
MONDAY, 31 MAY 2010 23:02

After a more than two-hour armed standoff Friday at an Athens area trailer park, the Athens County Sheriff’s Office and other police agencies pulled an unconscious convicted drug offender out of his home following an apparent suicide attempt.

Brian C. Koon, 30, had reportedly told authorities that he had an arsenal of weapons inside the mobile home at Pine-Aire Village on River Road near Athens.

Koon had been one of a number of people with active arrest warrants, who were being sought by the sheriff ‘s office and other police agencies in a coordinated drug-arrest sweep dubbed “Operation Dragnet,” according to a release from Sheriff Pat Kelly.

Kelly said Monday that officers had been pursuing Koon in an attempt to arrest him, but he “had been running from place to place.” They eventually caught up with him at Pine-Aire Village around 11:30 am., Kelly said.

The release said that Koon, who was wanted for failing to show up at the regional jail to begin serving an 11-month prison sentence on a drug possession charge, had “made threats that he was not going to return to jail, and that he had an arsenal inside of the trailer.”

Kelly said Monday that information officers had gotten from people who knew Koon raised concerns that he might be planning a “suicide by police,” in which he incited officers to shoot him. “He had said to friends and family members that there was no way he was going to go to jail; that the cops would have to kill him,” Kelly reported.

He added that this was “a major concern,” especially given that Koon had reportedly attempted suicide on previous occasions. “It was a big concern that he might try to have a police officer shoot him,” the sheriff said.

After a couple of hours of standoff outside Koon’s trailer in which authorities negotiated with him by phone and later by loudspeaker, deputies were able to force their way into the trailer, where they found Koon unconscious but alive, with a plastic band pulled tightly around his neck.

Kelly said Koon had opened a stove gas line inside the dwelling. When officers learned of this, they pulled back from the dwelling, and then began knocking out the windows with non-lethal “beanbag” projectiles. After this aired out the building, officers moved in to enter it, Kelly said, and found a .22-caliber rifle with a banana clip.

Koon was transported to O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, and then treated and released from a Columbus hospital and taken to the Southeastern Ohio Regional Jail.

The standoff was partly an outcome of “Operation Dragnet,” in which the sheriff, with the help of the Ohio Adult Parole Authority, the Nelsonville Police, the Glouster Police, and the Athens County Municipal Court probation services, sought to round up 21 people based on grand jury arrest warrants for them in drug-related cases, the release said.

Seven people from Glouster, Chauncey, Millfield, Amesville and The Plains (not including Koon) were arrested in the operation, and 13 others were still being sought as of Friday, Kelly reported in a release.

Kelly said Monday that he decided to put off the remaining arrests for later, in consideration of the fact that his officers had just been through a trying, high-pressure experience.

“After the shootout, I (temporarily) called off the operation,” he explained. “It was just time to give them a break.”


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