By Robert Mittendorf / The Bellingham Herald
Bellingham Police are searching for a man who briefly took someone hostage at a Puget neighborhood mobile home in what police suspect was a drug transaction.
Officers deployed the department’s BearCat armored truck about 8:20 a.m. Thursday to a mobile home park in the 1200 block of Lincoln Street for an apparent hostage situation. Other officers converged there and surrounded a unit at the corner of Ninth Street and Rutgers Boulevard inside the park.
But as man, who claimed to be the hostage, got free and fled before police arrived, then called 911 from the downtown Whatcom Transportation Authority bus station.
“We were just there getting some of our stuff,” said the man, who identified himself as Chris Burns. “He literally took as at gunpoint.”
Before Burns could elaborate on that statement, two police officers arrived to question him.
Meanwhile, officers carrying long guns flanked the one-story gray and white mobile home. Officers stormed inside under emergency provisions that allow a warrantless search when exigent circumstances exist, said Lt. Mike Johnston.
“We entered and and cleared the (building). There was no one there,” Johnston said. “There’s no one in custody. We’re interviewing someone who said he was a victim.”
According to emergency radio transmissions, the incident began with a 911 call about a fight inside the mobile home. Someone was punched and hit with a cane, by a man with a handgun who took a hostage into a room at the rear of the home, according to the caller who told a dispatcher that his name was “Chris.”
Other victims fled in a car and a truck, and told a dispatcher that they would meet police at a nearby coffee shop.
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