A six-hour standoff Saturday night in the 5900 block of Cherry Heights Road resulted in the peaceful surrender of a man who is accused of pointing a gun at another man.
John Dale Heebink, 57, was arrested at about 11:30 p.m. Saturday at his home, 5973 Cherry Heights Rd., on charges of unlawful use of a weapon and menacing.
While there were social media reports that multiple shots were fired during the standoff, The Dalles Police Chief Jay Waterbury said, “There were no shots fired. It sounded like there were, but those were gas grenades.”
The gas grenades were fired by the city police’s Special Emergency Response Team (SERT).
A man living at the address had called 911 at about 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 29 alleging Heebink had pointed a gun at his head, said Wasco County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Lane Magill.
Magill said he believed it had to do with a disagreement about money.
Police fired multiple canisters of tear gas into Heebink’s home, but “he continued to stay inside the residence for an extended period of time,” Magill said.
He finally came out through a set of sliding glass doors onto a deck and was told to put his hands up, Magill said.
He was instructed to turn around so officers could determine he wasn’t armed. Then “he just nonchalantly sat down in a chair on the deck” and three SERT members “rushed the deck and took him into custody.”
Once he was outside, Heebink said very little to deputies, Magill said, other than saying repeatedly that he didn’t have any guns.
Heebink had a blood-alcohol concentration of .31 – the legal limit is .08 – and was taken to the hospital to be medically cleared before being lodged at the regional jail, Magill said. He remained there Monday morning.
Law officers executed a search warrant on the remote three-story home – located at the end of a half-mile driveway — and found a 9mm handgun in a bedroom with a round in the chamber, but no clip inserted in it, Magill said. Several clips were found during the search of the house, he said.
When deputies arrived, all other occupants of the house except Heebink were already outside.
They were taken from the premises for their safety, Magill said. He said there were three or four people in the residence, or in surrounding trailers, when the 911 call was made.
Heebink has a long, non-felony criminal history, mostly for probation violations and drunk driving arrests, said Magill.
In 2010 a man shot and killed another man at the same home on Cherry Heights, and Heebink was a witness to the crime, Magill said.
Magill requested the assistance of the city’s SERT team about an hour into the standoff. Efforts to speak to Heebink through loudspeakers were fruitless. “He refused to speak to us or acknowledge we were there,” Magill said.
The tear gas the SERT team fired into the home was so potent that deputies waited about 45 minutes after Heebink was arrested to search the house, and then when they did so they used breathing gear from Mid-Columbia Fire & Rescue.
Another deputy told Magill at the scene that about one of every 100 people is immune to the effects of gas. “You could hear him coughing and hacking inside every so often. I don’t know that he was 100 percent immune but he was tough enough to stay barricaded in there,” Magill said.
He added that the house was large and he may have been able to evade the gas by going to other rooms.
Magill said law officers will patiently wait out a barricaded subject if need be. “Any time we get into a barricaded situation, especially one like this where we know there’s weapons, our goal is to not enter the house if we can keep from doing that because we don’t want to put the deputies or SERT team members in jeopardy,” he said.
And that can mean a waiting game. “We’ll spend hours on end before we’ll ever go inside a residence. We don’t like going in unless it’s absolutely imperative that we do that.”
Sometimes the wait can go on so long that shift changes happen during a standoff, and personnel are simply switched out and the wait continues.
Magill said he appreciated the help of The Dalles Police Department and its SERT team, the Oregon State Police and Mid-Columbia Fire & Rescue.
Waterbury said the SERT team was established in the 1980s and trains monthly. It is deployed infrequently, and is called out no more than six times a year on average.
“It’s awful nice to have them when we need them right away because otherwise the state police would have to respond and that can take hours because their team comes from all over the state,” Waterbury said.
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