Besieged at the coffee shop!

Although, okay, the siege was across the street at the hotel. Still. It was the coffee shop. We were stuck inside. Because of, you know, the siege.

As we frequently do of a Saturday morn my BFF Joe and I met for breakfast at our favorite Village Inn on Menaul east of University. As we ate and talked some people came in talking excitedly about all the police and emergency vehicles across the street at the hotel. I glanced out the window – we were in a booth on the east side of the building, near the front – but saw nothing interesting.

But people kept peering out and getting more and more interested in what was going on. I looked around a while later and saw a whole fleet of police vehicles on the east side of the hotel and in the parking lot across the side street. I also commented on the presence of the Hazmat truck.

Then the big white evidence van turned into the side street.

I went to the bathroom. When I returned Joe told me about fifteen guys in body armor and camouflage, toting assault rifles, had just trotted into the building. There were some other dudes in battledress hanging around a white SUV, which I took for their equipment truck. They were there the whole time.

So, things were getting more and more intriguing. News camerapersons from somewhere set up a camera on a tripod on our (north) side of the street.

Joe went and suggested to the manage that he draw the front shades – in case some crazy decided he wasn’t getting enough attention and tried targeting people sitting by the windows. Not much happened as a result of that. Possibly the police advised it was unnecessary, as we found later.

Joe and I didn’t, you know, move away from the window or anything. The walls, I believe, are nice and comforting brick. If high-velocity metal particulate pollution got to be an issue, we could get on the floor. It’s nothing I haven’t done before, but that’s another story.

Westbound traffic backed up on Menaul. The cops were diverting people through the VI parking lot – in one entrance, around the back, and out the other.  This didn’t seem the best solution, and in reasonably short order somebody wised up and blocked the street a block east, where there was an actual street to send people up.

We were thinking about leaving when the manager came by to tell us the police had sealed the perimeter and were asking everybody to stay inside. As in not leave.

We also found out that Joe’s leading surmise was correct: some suicidal guy had forted himself up in there. (If you want to off yourself, a proven and reliable way to do it is to lock yourself inside your house, apartment, or hotel room, call 911, and say you’re not coming out. For some reason that inspires the police to rush over and kill you.)

So we sat there a while watching what we could see. Which wasn’t, in truth, much. The Camo Dudes continued to hang out by the toybox truck. The hotel maintenance staff (we guessed from their matching blue shirts, anyway) came to hang out near the camera crew on our side of the street.

It looked as if we could be there a while. These standoffs can go on for a long time. Especially if the guy shot himself early on and the police negotiator was going to spend the next sixteen hours trying to talk his cooling corpse into surrendering (“Don’t do it, Charlie! It isn’t worth it!”). Which happens.

I got to regretting I hadn’t set up my TracFone to communicate with Twitter. VI doesn’t have public WiFi, and anyway my netbook was in the car, where I couldn’t go get it. So, no live bulletins from the front lines: sorries. I did eventually text my friend Larry.

A cop came in and spoke to a manager. Suddenly people started queuing up at the cash register. Sure enough, the manager turned up to say we were cleared to go. But we were supposed to leave by the east entrance, and turn left, for some reason.

We decided to wait until the line got shorter. We got talking again. Finally it struck me we might want to move out while the moving was good. Our chance to leave could be merely a window, which could close promptly if things suddenly hit the fan.

So off we went. As I was paying Joe talked to a manager. It turned out the guy in whose honor they were holding the standoff was in a room on the south side of the hotel, facing away from us, which was why the police decided to let us go.

As we exited the coffee shop the negotiator was yelling at the forted-up guy on a loudspeaker. Guess he wasn’t answering his room phone. Possibly because he was, I don’t know, dead?

At any rate I noticed a lot of what seemed plain old citizens loitering around the front entrance. Which didn’t seem that great an idea. First of all, police have been known to be mistaken about things like where their target actually is. Or how well contained he is – meaning he might have moved without anybody noticing.

Also, contrary to what you hear endlessly in the media and see on all the cop-porn TV dramas, not all cops handle their weapons particularly well. If shooting broke out we weren’t necessarily immune to catching a stray one even on the supposedly wrong side of the building, and in any event the other direction from the presumed perp. There’s always the happy prospect of accidental discharge when some eager beaver is trotting around with his finger on his M-4′s trigger and the safety off.

So we hustled out of there without our usual ceremonial 10-15 minutes of fat-chewing in the parking lot. (Joe and I like to talk. We’re good at it.) Fortunately by this time they’d reopened Menaul and were allowing us to use both exits from the parking lot.

So ended our Great Coffee House Siege of ’10. And, just a note, none of this was remotely the fault of Village Inn or the restaurant’s personnel and management. Who are really nice people and have been super solicitous about me since my little health faux pas earlier in the year. They’re not responsible for what goes on across the damn street. That’s why I restrained my initial impulse to give this post a cutesy title like The Village Inn-cident. There is too such a thing as bad publicity.

When I got home, after a side trip to Costco – where, in total, I’ve spent upwards of $200 in the last two weeks (drat you, Emma Dog, for refusing to learn not to eat!) – naturally my first action was to hop online and try to get the details on what as going on, and how (and whether) the standoff had been resolved.

And guess what? Nada. On the usually-reliable KOAT-TV website the closest thing I could find was a bit on a freaking bear invasion.

And … this is odd. The situation must’ve started no later than about 11 AM – we got out around 12:30 PM, if memory serves (and remember, it doesn’t always.) It’s now 2:24 PM in the Mountain West. And the damn bears are still the “top story” over to KOAT.

Then again, sometimes incidents that ought to be fairly major news … get flushed, somehow. Are never heard about. I know this from personal experience. Still, I can’t imagine the local news not eventually saying something about so major a flap in the middle of Albuquerque.

Then again, we shall see.

And that’s why I haven’t gotten anything constructive done today! It’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

Popularity: 3% [?]