FOLLOWUP: Harbor Avenue standoff subject charged with two felonies
(WSB reader photo, texted during August 10th standoff)
One week ago today, much of Harbor Avenue was closed to traffic while police tried to get a burglary suspect to surrender. He finally was taken into custody after about nine hours. Because he was taken to Harborview for evaluation before he was taken to jail, we weren’t able to track his status for a while – but today we’ve found out from the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office that the man arrested that day, 31-year-old Dino George, is in jail and charged with two felonies.
Documents in the case, including the police report, confirm that George was involved with two prior calls to police in the hours before this incident, including one we had mentioned, a short-lived “scenes of violence” response to the nearby Harbor Avenue 7-11. The police report says George told someone there that he had been stabbed, but when emergency responders arrived, he was gone; they eventually found him nearby but he had no injuries. In the other call, the report says, “He had stated that he had a DOC [state] warrant, but would only turn himself in to a DOC officer. He was extremely hostile toward officers. We were not able to locate any outstanding warrants in the system and after speaking with DOC, they were not able to respond. He was able to care for himself. The male declined any assistance from officers, appeared extremely paranoid, and left the area.”
Then came the call that led to the standoff. The report says someone called to say a man was screaming about breaking windows and a vehicle horn was honking nonstop. Police returned, found George again, heard him again say he would turn himself in to the DOC, on an alleged warrant police couldn’t find, and he then walked away. Continuing to look around the area, police found a vehicle with a broken window, so they went looking for George again, and found him having just hopped the fence and broken a window to get into a warehouse building in the 2600 block of Harbor SW. From there, the report continues:
Once inside the building he ultimately barricaded himself in an office on the second floor and began damaging the entire office, throwing item from the windows and continually breaking items inside the office.
We were ultimately able to enter the locked gate to the parking lot by cutting the lock off. We then entered the building through the same broken window where the suspect had entered as officers at the front of the building attempted to have the suspect exit the on his own. He continually refused. DOC officer ultimately responded and located the outstanding warrant, but the suspect still refused to come out, continually stacking items in front of the door and throwing items out of the window. During our entire contact suspect was armed with a tire iron.
After several hours of negotiation with no success, we were finally able to locate a phone number for the business supervisor and an employee who responded to the scene. The suspect was still locked inside the office and all attempts to have him exit in his own failed. … While hanging out of the window, the suspect threw his tire iron at a patrol car, denting the driver side door. … Seattle SWAT ultimately responded to the scene and began trying to speak with the suspect. He continually refused their requests/commands to exit the building. They made entry into the office area and held on the room negotiating with him for several more hours.
The probable-cause document picks it up from there, saying that damage done to both the building and the tenants’ furniture and other items inside the office totaled more than $16,000. The car with the smashed window sustained about $1,000 damage. But the trouble didn’t end once George was taken into custody; the document also says that at Harborview, George spat “a large amount of saliva” into an officer’s face. That resulted in a felony charge of third-degree assault; he also is charged with second-degree burglary. The King County Jail Register says he’s being held without bail, apparently due to the aforementioned warrant, related to a 2015 domestic-violence assault case in Kent in which George was reported to have hit his 78-year-old grandfather in the face with brass knuckles. The jail-register log shows he’s spent a cumulative total of 11 weeks in jail related to four bookings in the past four months on warrants in that case, and was most recently released on August 2nd.
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