SEATTLE – A three-hour police standoff outside a hotel ended Saturday afternoon when a man inside fatally shot himself, police said.
More than two dozen police officers surrounded the Pine City Inn in South Seattle after receiving a 911 call from a friend who said the 33-year-old Seattle man was threatening to kill himself, Seattle police spokesman Scott Moss said.
A police negotiator talked to the man by telephone for about an hour as a portion of Fourth Avenue S. was closed to traffic.
At some point, officers heard a gunshot, then filled the room with pepper spray to see if they could coax the man out of the building. When he failed to emerge, police went inside and found him dead with a gunshot wound to the head.
Man sentenced for smuggling aliens: A Chinese citizen has been sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to smuggle and transport illegal aliens, a scheme that resulted in the deaths of four would-be immigrants sealed with 14 others in a cargo container. Three bodies were found when the Japanese-owned Cape May docked here in January 2000, and a fourth person died later in New York. Three people were indicted in the case. Chao Kang Lin, 31, of Flushing, N.Y., was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein.
From Herald news services
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