Mysterious Police Call Leads To SWAT Situation In Brighton Heights
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – A SWAT team situation in Pittsburgh has ended, but police are still trying to make sense of the call that started it all.
At first, police were looking for a father who may have harmed his son. Now, they're looking for whoever made a phone call that set a number of police agencies in motion, unnecessarily.
The call came to the city police homicide desk around 8 a.m. Friday; and the content of that call was chilling.
"We have a call in to the homicide detective's desk from a man who claimed that he had stabbed his son and tied him up," said city public safety spokesperson Sonya Toler. "Once we came out here to the location of the home, we discovered that the address didn't exist. So, we weren't sure what we had going on here."
Police determined the name given identified a man who once lived at a house on Courtright Street in the city's Marshall-Shadeland neighborhood, but no longer does.
Neighbors weren't accustomed to all this early in the morning.
"I was upstairs," said neighbor Chris Gasior. "My mother came upstairs and said, 'I think the Army or something is outside.'"
Police determined the mother of the 4-year-old boy lived there and she showed them that neither the man nor the boy was there, which left the question, where were they and was the child safe.
So, Penn Hills and Allegheny County Police located the man at his residence in Penn Hills. But once they questioned him, they removed his handcuffs.
They determined that the boy was not harmed, and the father, declining to give reporters his full name, said he never called police and was startled he could be the center of so much attention.
But their lives weren't the only ones disrupted in Penn Hills. Penn Hills High School was on lockdown till the case was resolved.
Joyce Ellis, a motivational speaker from Washington County, was supposed to speak to students there.
"The principal called and said, 'Joyce, we're on lockdown,'" she said.
That lockdown lasted from 10:36 a.m. till noon.
Meanwhile, city police say the original caller that set off the incident could face charges, including risking a catastrophe.
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