One man is in custody and facing charges after a five-hour standoff overnight at a Lynn Valley home seriously damaged by a fire just three days earlier.
North Vancouver RCMP say a neighbour on the 1500 block of Dovercourt Road noticed a man acting suspiciously and breaking into the fire-damaged home around 7 p.m. Sunday.
Several of the windows had been boarded up and the home was left uninhabitable by a fire early Friday morning.
When police arrived, the man confronted them at one of the windows and gave “quite an explicit direction that he was not going to come out and that he did have access to firearms and he would use them against police, so he was obviously quite upset. And he threatened the police, so we retracted and left him in there,” said Cpl. Richard De Jong, North Vancouver RCMP spokesman.
Police called in the emergency response team including a negotiator. After close to five hours of talks aimed at finding “what was making him tick,” police used a stun grenade to distract the man and take him down.
No one was injured in the arrest, according to police, and the man appears to not have had a gun as he claimed.
The home belongs to the suspect’s parents, De Jong said. They were treated for smoke inhalation after a basement fire erupted in the house on Friday morning.
De Jong could not say what the connection was between the two incidents.
“That’s what we’re investigating at this point. He wasn’t there at the time of the fire. The cause of the fire is still being investigated so it’s still unclear as to how the fire started and why he was adamant to get back into the house,” De Jong said.
Brian Marcel Svetelj, 44, appeared in court on Monday where the Crown swore charges of mischief under $5,000, breaking and entering, assaulting a police officer with a weapon and uttering threats.
