After allegedly shooting six Philadelphia police officers during an over seven-hour standoff from his apartment building, the shooting suspect surrendered Wednesday night after calling his lawyer “in a panic” and was taken into police custody.
On Wednesday, police identified the suspect as a 36-year-old African-American man from Philadelphia with a lengthy rap sheet dating back to when he was 18 that includes gun, drug, and aggravated assault convictions and kidnapping and attempted murder charges (his name is here withheld due to Daily Wire policy on mass shootings).
“The standoff began Wednesday about 4:30 p.m. when a Narcotics Strike Force unit attempted to serve a search warrant at a house on the 3700 block of North 15th Street,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. After he shot six police officers, all of whom are expected to recover, authorities spent several hours attempting to get him to surrender. He finally gave himself up at around midnight.
NBC Philadelphia reports that around midnight, a member of the SWAT team shot tear gas into the suspect’s apartment; he soon walked out of his home and was taken into custody by police. “He had a gun on him at the time, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross said,” NBC notes.
Shaka Johnson, the lawyer of the suspect, spoke with the Inquirer Wednesday night, confirming that his client was the man involved in the shootout. “My client is requesting me to come to the scene,” said Johnson.
In an interview after the suspect surrendered, Johnson told CBS that his client had called him around 8:30 p.m. “in a panic.” “I told him, ‘You gotta surrender, man,'” Johnson told the press.
The suspect was first taken to Temple University Hospital for evaluation, before being released to police custody Thursday morning, NBC reports.
Johnson says his client is likely to be charged with six counts of attempted murder and aggravated assault.
Those charges would add to an already lengthy list of charges tracing back to 2001, when the suspect was first arrested at age 18 for possessing a gun with an altered serial number. The Inquirer provides a summary of his numerous arrests and convictions:
Public records show that he has been arrested about a dozen times since turning 18, and convicted six times on charges that involved illegal possession of guns, drug dealing, and aggravated assault. He has been in and out of prison; the longest sentence handed him came in 2010, when a federal judge gave him a 55-month term.
And, his record would indicate, he does not like to go to prison. In 2008, he was convicted of escaping, fleeing from police, and resisting arrest. Along the way, he beat criminal charges on everything from kidnapping to attempted murder.
His 2010 federal prison sentence came after he pled guilty in 2008 to federal firearms violations for illegally possessing a Smith & Wesson .357 and a Taurus PT .45 semiautomatic, the Inquirer notes. He was also convicted in 2013 of perjury and given seven years probation. But even on probation, he racked up more charges, including fleeing officers on an unregistered scooter, putting pedestrians at risk, charges for which he was eventually acquitted. He arrested again in October 2014 on charges of drug possession and false imprisonment but somehow managed to “beat” those charges as well.
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