Hostage-taking ends peacefully after standoff

A would-be bank robber who held a knife to a woman’s chest and briefly took her hostage in Hayward was arrested Tuesday by plainclothes officers who happened to be nearby, police said.

The incident began when a man with a knife walked into the Wells Fargo Bank at 1172 A St. about 11:30 a.m., handed a teller a demand note and ordered customers to lie down on the floor, said Hayward police Lt. Roger Keener.

As an employee activated a silent alarm, a customer who managed to escape ran into two plainclothes detectives who were “around the corner” on an unrelated investigation, Keener said.

The detectives looked through the glass and saw the suspect holding a knife to a woman’s chest, Keener said.

The two went inside the bank and ordered the man to let the woman go and drop the knife, but he refused, police said.

One of the detectives, a trained hostage negotiator, persisted. The woman also told the suspect “that she had a baby,” Keener said.

The pleas from police and the woman eventually led the man to let her go and surrender, Keener said. The woman was not harmed.

The suspect’s name was not immediately released.

During the incident, the man claimed he was going to “blow things up,” Keener said. An Alameda County sheriff’s bomb-sniffing dog checked the bank and found nothing.