Neighbors Return Home Following Overnight Standoff in Normally Quiet SLP Neighborhood

Don Zrust has lived on the corner of Nevada Avenue and 31st Street for 37 years. Never before has he been asked to evacuate his home, but police asked him and his wife to do just that late Sunday night.

"They came and got us about five to 12 tonight and said, 'we're evacuating,'" Zrust said. "They didn't say we had to go, but I just assumed they were evacuating and we had to go."

Initial reports and eyewitness accounts indicate a domestic dispute at the house next door to Zrust's escalated into an armed standoff with police in what is usually a quiet St. Louis Park neighborhood. Adjacent neighbors who chose not to leave their home were told to stay indoors, and a two-block area around the surrounded residence was cordoned off with yellow police tape.

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A cruiser escorted Zrust and his wife to the St. Louis Park Police Station, where they sat in a waiting room until the scene had been secured.  The couple returned to their home around 2:30 a.m. after a SWAT team apprehended the barricaded man, who was taken—alive—from the scene by ambulance.

Police repeatedly issued surrender commands via bullhorn during the standoff, all of which went unheeded. Some sort of flash bang or bean bag shell was used to breach a window around 1 a.m., and a K-9 was sent into the home about an hour later.

Zrust said he knows nothing about the man at the center of the more than eight-hour standoff. 

"I wouldn't recognize him if he walked up here," he said. "I've never seen him, and I saw her outside once mowing the lawn."

Neighbors say police first arrived at the home around 6 p.m. A SWAT team was called in around 10 p.m., and a man who Patch is not identifying was taken from the home by stretcher around 2:15 a.m.

St. Louis Park Police Chief Jon Luse was not on the scene of Sunday's standoff, and an officer with the department said no official statement would be available until at least 8 a.m. Monday.