Meadow Lake standoff ends with arrest

Multiple guns found in home

A two-hour standoff near Meadow Lake ended peacefully with the arrest of one man who now faces assault and weapons charges.

“He was arrested without incident and that’s exactly what we want,” Meadow Lake RCMP Sgt. Phil Degruchy said. “Nobody wants to come to work and deal with the other option.”

The incident started just after 7 p.m. on Saturday when the Meadow Lake RCMP detachment received an emergency call from a man claiming a woman was dead in his rural home. The man then told RCMP that the woman was alive, but that he was going to get a gun and kill her. At that moment, the call ended.

“We lost the call, probably because he hung up,” Degruchy said.

Officers were immediately dispatched to the home — described as an acreage just outside of Meadow Lake — but before they arrived, they learned the woman had fled the residence for a guest house on the same property. When officers arrived, they found her unharmed and took her to the Meadow Lake detachment.

“By the sound of it, he told her to leave the residence,” Degruchy said.

For the next two hours, officers were involved in a standoff with a man in the residence. Eleven officers helped secure a perimeter around the house and the two sides were in continual contact, but the man made no demands. RCMP were acting with the knowledge that guns were in the home, but the man did not brandish any during the standoff.

“He would come out of the residence and yell at us for a bit, then go back in and that went on for a couple of hours,” Degruchy said.

It wasn’t until 10:30 p.m. that the man exited the home and surrendered to police with incident.

A search of the residence turned up a loaded .22-calibre rifle, a broken .22-calibre rifle, a .303-calibre rifle, am- munition, two pellet guns and a toy shotgun.

A 52-year-old man has been charged with two counts of uttering threats, one count of assault, one count of careless storage of a firearm, one count of possessing a restricted firearm and one count of resisting arrest.

The man is expected to appear in Meadow Lake provincial court today.