Officer shot during standoff at rural home

Tue, Aug 18, 2009    to del.icio.us

SOUTH ROCKWOOD (AP) — A southeast Michigan police officer is expected to survive a gunshot wound he sustained Monday during a standoff with a man who police say shot himself in the head.

South Rockwood Police Cpl. Thomas Murphy was out of surgery and improving later in the afternoon, Chief James Miller told The Monroe Evening News. He was shot outside a home in a rural area of Berlin Township, a Monroe County community about 30 miles south-southwest of Detroit.

Monroe County Sheriff's Lt. Todd Opperman told the newspaper that the 56-year-old man who barricaded himself in his home for about three hours was listed in guarded condition at a nearby hospital Monday afternoon.

The department said in a statement that officers responded to a report of shots being fired from the driveway into the house. Murphy shot his Taser gun during the standoff, and the man shot Murphy with his handgun as he was falling, police said.

The suspect's identity wasn't released. Sheriff's officials declined to comment to The Associated Press by phone, at the shooting scene or the department headquarters in Monroe.

Law enforcement officials from several agencies worked at the scene, blocking streets and restricting access to the house on a rural two-lane road that connects the communities of South Rockwood and Carleton near Lake Erie.

Police called residents in the immediate area Monday morning to tell them to stay in their homes, and a nearby school holding summer classes was locked down.

Mark and Barbara Fenech said the suspect lived in a red-brick house near their property, but did not know his name.

Mark Fenech, 45, a welder who came home from work to be with his wife after learning of the standoff, described his neighbor as "fairly normal." Fenech said the man gave him some vegetables last week and never had problems with him.

Opperman said authorities have had past dealings with the suspect but declined to elaborate.