Wahiawa standoff ends with one dead
| • | Recent shootings involving police |
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
Police shot and killed a 20-year-old man early yesterday after an hours-long standoff at the man's Wahiawa home.
Friends and neighbors identified the dead man as Dustin Long of 290 Karsten Drive.
The incident began, they said, when Long fired shots at a carload of young men who had been attending a party at Long's family home.
Police said it ended when Long fired shots at two Specialized Services Division, or SWAT team, officers. The officers fired back, detectives said, and the man was killed.
No police officers were injured.
An 18-year-old man who was in a Volkswagen Golf that Long fired upon was wounded in the shoulder. A 20-year-old man was wounded in the right forearm. The driver of the Volkswagen and two other male passengers in the car were not hit.
Neither police nor the medical examiner's office would say how many times Long had been shot. Internal affairs, homicide and the criminal investigations division of the Honolulu Police Department are investigating the incident.
Family friends filed in and out of the big black gate that fronts the Long house yesterday afternoon. Some brought gifts. Most looked grim as they walked the long driveway to the house.
Two visitors, one of them who had known and worked with Long's mother for several years, arrived in an ambulance, wearing emergency medical worker uniforms.
Long's mother, a widow for just a couple of years, works in the emergency room of Wahiawa General Hospital. She was in the emergency room when the driver of the Volkswagen brought the two injured men in for treatment, the paramedic said. When the young men said who had shot them, the mother hurried away.
Georgina Edayan lives across the street from the Longs. Edayan said that when police evacuated the neighborhood about 3 a.m., she saw Long's mother standing outside the gate of her property, wearing her white work uniform.
She was still there when police let the neighbors go home about 7 a.m., Edayan said.
Police said that during the intervening hours, negotiators were trying to get Long, who was inside his house with the rifle, to come out. Instead, he yelled obscenities and threats at the officers, and eventually shot at two of them.
The first officers to respond to the disturbance in the neighborhood did not know they were headed to a shooting, much less a standoff with an armed man, detectives said. The earliest call, at shortly after 2 a.m., reported fighting at Long's address.
The 18-year-old man who was hurt in the shoulder said he had been at Long's house when the fighting broke out. On the advice of his parents, the man asked that his name not be used in the newspaper. He and his family feared that Long's friends might blame him for Long's death.
The party was uneventful until Long began arguing with a woman, the 18-year-old said. He told her to leave, then went into the house, came out with what appeared to be a .22-caliber rifle and fired it into the air.
The 18-year-old said some of his friends were fighting with some of Long's friends at that point, but he and his buddies heard the shots and headed toward their Volkswagen Golf, which was parked across the street.
Long fired at them as they pulled away, he said. The body and back window of the car were pierced by bullets.
Marla Edayan, Georgina's daughter, said she stepped outside her mother's house early yesterday when she heard a commotion across the street. She saw five young men, including a man she knew well and another who is her nephew, pile into a Volkswagen Golf.
She looked up and across the street. There, balancing atop a wooden support at one end of the gate was the polite young neighbor who always called her "auntie."
Long was holding a rifle, she said, and firing it repeatedly at the departing car.
