All three suspects in yesterday's bank robbery in Clarksville - which resulted in a chase that spanned four counties and ended with a shoot-out in the Greencastle Lakes neighborhood - have been apprehended, with one suspect fatally shot. While East County takes a sigh of relief after a day that contained an area-wide police search, multiple roadblocks and school lockdowns, it's now up to Howard County Police to explain their questionable treatment of the suspects, which is now undergoing an internal investigation:
"Police deployed "stop-sticks" multiple times on Route 32 near Route 29, ultimately flattening three of the truck's tires. The truck hit an officer's car, and police took Zombro into custody. That arrest was videotaped by WJLA-TV (Channel 7). The video shows an officer punching Zombro in the back while he was lying on the ground."Meanwhile, kudos to the Post for painting East County as part suburban wasteland, part war zone. Whether or not it was actually deserved, it's part depressing, part exciting (emphasis added):
The bank robbery pursuit put a sprawling neighborhood south of Burtonsville in a virtual lockdown as officers roared along streets hanging onto the sides of tactical SWAT trucks, searched wooded areas on horseback and looked in "any place that could contain a human being," said Lt. Paul Starks, a Montgomery police spokesman. At least two police helicopters circled above. Residents coming out of the neighborhood were stopped by pairs of officers, with one slowly opening car trunks and another pointing a high-powered rifle . . .
They drove nearly another mile, into a neighborhood of dozens of townhouse developments, with at least four public schools nearby.Oh, well. Anything's better than the sniper attacks, during which I spent three hours on a school bus held up on Route 29 at Briggs Chaney Road (back when there was a stoplight) because of a roadblock set up to catch a particular white van.
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At one point in time, I was thinking it would be really cool to start up a punk rock band, one that would sing about the banality of suburbia and the ineptitude of local officials. I was going to call it "White Box Truck".
Talk about returns to banal suburbia! I was sitting in the basement and got a call from an officer who gave me the over-the-phone third degree about this and that, and strangely diverted into my taste in science-fiction-horror writing. After a clear attempt to provoke me into a psychotic break, he asked me where I was at the time the main rampage started and I told him I had been down the street helping a neighbor lady patch her driveway. A few minutes later she calls me up to tell me that the SWAT team had knocked on her door and wanted to know if she had been patching her driveway with the freak on the corner when the Snipers were running around town blasting away, and she had told them "yes". I went out the next morning and counted the bootprints in the yard, and resolved to start a punk-rock band once all of this was over. Maybe with a track titled "State Police Watch List / Terrorism No-Fly".
Back to yesterday's excitement: the Post is a little unclear about whether or not Zombro is thought to be associated with the bank-robbery in Howard. Neither the Post nor the Gazette identify the suspect in custody, or the decedent suspect. From the way it's written up, it seems as if Zombro just sort of drove into the hot-spot without a clue and then freaked out when eight gajillion cops went all tactical on his ass.
It wouldn't be the first time such a thing had happened, after all, "see above" regarding the SWAT team calling me up by cellphone from out in the street where they were evidently sure they had a sniper-scope serial killer surrounded. Zombro doesn't much match the description of "light-skinned black men in their late teens or early 20s" but then again, neither Malvo nor Muhammad matched the description declared by then-Chief of Police Moose: "only a white man could have done this".
Now, about that banal suburbia...
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