Police in Anaheim were faced with a pre-dawn standoff in the Southern California city when a suspect barricaded himself inside an apartment building for four hours after allegedly shooting another man in the face.
The standoff ended when the suspect—who was charged Dec. 14 with attempted murder and assault with a firearm, both felonies—leapt out of the apartment’s second-story window after the Anaheim SWAT team fired a tear gas ball into the complex. Upon landing, the suspect was restrained by a police dog before being arrested.
The early morning incident began around 1 a.m. on Dec. 11 when Anaheim Police Department officers responded to a call at an apartment complex on the 1800 block of West Gramercy Place, near Chippewa Avenue, where they discovered a young man with a bullet wound to his face outside the apartments.
Sgt. Shane Carringer of the Anaheim Police Department told The Epoch Times that Anaheim officers then made contact with the shooter inside of the apartment—but the suspect refused to surrender.
After the situation escalated to a “barricaded suspect call,” Carringer said Anaheim SWAT and tactical negotiators were called to the scene. The specialists then negotiated with the suspect for four hours, attempting to get him to surrender peacefully.
“Those negotiations continued to stall,” Carringer said.
Around 5 a.m., after hours of negotiating, the SWAT team used a paintball gun to launch a “10X pepper ball,” containing a micropowderized version of pepper spray, into the unit, Carringer said, to “encourage the suspect to peacefully surrender.”
However, instead of surrendering, the suspect jumped out of a rear second-story window.
“He landed on a car that was parked underneath the window,” Carringer said.
After the suspect bounced off a white, four-door sedan, police deployed a member of the canine team to apprehend him. The dog restrained the suspect—biting him in the upper thigh, then dragging him back to officers by the hip.
Police identified the suspect as Angel Avalos, 25, of Anaheim. Avalos was arrested and taken to a local hospital for treatment of injuries sustained in the fall and from the dog bite.
After getting cleared at the hospital, Avalos was then booked into jail. He was charged Dec. 14 with the two felonies, attempted murder and assault with a firearm, along with sentencing enhancement allegations for inflicting great bodily injury on the victim, the personal use of a firearm, and attempted premeditated murder. His arraignment has been scheduled for Jan. 6, 2021.
Police identified the victim as a Hispanic male in his 20s. He nderwent hours of surgeries for his wound, and remains in the hospital in critical condition.
