standoff

June 3 (UPI) — A 15-hour standoff at a California bank ended with the suspect shot dead and all hostages freed, police said Wednesday.

The man had barricaded himself inside the Chase Bank building on Chester Avenue and 17th Street in Bakersfield at about 1 p.m. PDT Tuesday. Police were sent to the downtown bank for a bomb threat, and when they arrived they found a man was inside the bank with several hostages, though some were able to escape.

Buildings in the area were evacuated, and police responded with SWAT teams, hostage negotiators and a bomb squad.

Twice on Tuesday evening, hostage negotiators convinced the suspect to release a hostage.

But around 4:20 a.m. Wednesday, the situation “concluded following an officer-involved shooting” by FBI personnel, the Bakersfield Police Department said in a press release. It also said the department was not involved in the use of force.

The FBI Sacramento office said earlier that it was sending help to the scene.

The number of people taken hostage wasn’t immediately clear, but those who remained in the building were unharmed.

“We are aware of the ongoing situation occurring at the building where our branch is located on the ground floor,” a Chase Bank spokesperson told CBS News in a statement. “The branch is currently empty, and we are working with authorities.”

The area around the building was still closed Wednesday morning. Police told the public to avoid the area and allow for extra travel time.

May 9 (UPI) — A man accused of shooting and injuring three Syracuse, N.Y., police officers surrendered without incident Saturday after an hours-long standoff in the city, authorities said.

The suspect surrendered to police at 3:15 p.m. Saturday, nine hours after barricading himself in an apartment complex on the city’s south side, Syracuse Police Chief Chief Mark Rusin told reporters.

The man’s arrest came after he allegedly fired shots at officers who had formed a perimeter around the building, hitting two of them in the arm and another in the hand, the chief said.

“They’re in stable condition,” he said. “Most of the injuries are to their arms, to their hands, but they are in stable condition and they’re with their families right now, so the officers are okay.”

The incident began at 6:30 a.m. with a call to police about a man with a machete menacing people and a dog and escalated from there.

It drew a large cadre of responding units, including the Syracuse Police Department’s SWAT team, the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office, New York State Police and the FBI.

Residents from the surrounding area were evacuated from their homes during the standoff.

Rusin said the suspect, who is expected to be arraigned on Sunday, could face attempted murder charges for shooting at the officers, as well as possible charges of assault and criminal weapons possession.

Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens praised the responders for their “outstanding coordination.

“This community should be very proud of the coordinated efforts of all of our law enforcement and emergency services teams to bring this situation to a close, which what is obviously — aside from our officers being harmed — the best scenario we can get with what we have.”

Reporting from Sacramento — The streets near the state Capitol emptied Monday after a man barricaded himself in his parked car near the building for more than two hours, prompting fears of a possible bomb attack.

Sacramento police and the California Highway Patrol cordoned off several city blocks as SWAT officers and hostage negotiators attempted to make contact with the man, who had scrawled “cops or criminals” and “I just want justice” on his Mazda sedan and plastered the car windows with paper signs.

He voluntarily surrendered without incident just over two hours after police were called to the scene at 1:47 p.m. The Sacramento Bee identified the man as Edgar Napoles-Rodriguez, 27, of Sacramento, though the suspect’s name has not yet been released by officials.

According to court records, the former roommate of Napoles-Rodriguez was granted a temporary restraining order against him last week. The roommate alleged in a legal filing with the Sacramento County Superior Court that Napoles-Rodriguez threatened her with a baseball bat and also threatened to burn down her house.

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FOR THE RECORD

April 20, 11 a.m.: An earlier version of this post referred to Edgar Napoles-Rodriguez’s female former roommate as a man. It also misstated Napoles-Rodriguez’s age as 28; he is 27.

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Law enforcement snipers were spotted on the roof of the Capitol during the standoff. A police robot was used when officers attempted to contact the suspect in his car, which was parked on L Street directly in front of the Capitol building. Before surrendering, the man exited the car and began shouting, “Want to shoot me? Shoot me!”

“He may have not had the best of intentions or be the clearest of mind,” said Officer Matthew McPhail, spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department.

The Capitol was not evacuated during the incident, but one entrance was closed.

The Assembly adjourned early Monday but was scheduled to vote on several big issues, including a ban on smoking on college campuses. It wrapped up the meeting abruptly before 3 p.m.

The Senate went through its full agenda as planned and wished Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Rafael) a happy birthday before adjourning after 3 p.m. without any announcement of the security situation going on outside the building.

Asked about the situation, Claire Conlon, a spokeswoman for the Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León said, “It’s our policy not to discuss Capitol security details.”

The state Capitol’s security has been ramped up considerably over the last decade.

The most significant incident came late on the night of Jan. 16, 2001, when a big-rig truck smashed into the south side of the historic building during a late-night legislative session on California’s energy crisis. The driver, a 37-year-old man with a history of prison time and mental health issues, slammed his tractor-trailer into the granite portico of the building, and it erupted in flames.

That, plus the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., that fall, sparked a slow but steady move toward increased security around the 142-year-old building.

Now, the perimeter is surrounded by barricades that rise up from the sidewalk, and all public visitors are routed through metal detectors and bag-scanning areas on the north and south sides of the building.

Times staff writers Liam Dillon and Patrick McGreevy contributed to this report.

phil.willon@latimes.com

Follow @philwillon on Twitter for the latest news on California politics

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday faced federal lawmakers for the first time since September as he sought to defend a more than 12% proposed cut to his department’s budget and dodge arrows from angry Democrats along the way.

In his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, kicking off an expected sprint of seven budget hearings he’ll attend across congressional committees and subcommittees over the next week, Kennedy emphasized the administration’s work to reform dietary guidelines and crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Republicans on the committee praised Kennedy as a “breath of fresh air” and asked him to promote his department’s recent actions. Democrats, who have been furious over Kennedy’s sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, largely had a different agenda.

They needled Kennedy on what they viewed as the Trump administration’s hypocrisy on fraud, demanded to know why he was cutting budgets for various programs and slammed his efforts to pull back vaccine recommendations and messaging, which they said have caused unnecessary deaths.

Kennedy fired back, often raising his voice as he accused the Democrats of misrepresenting his work and past statements.

Here are three standout moments from Thursday’s hearing:

A standoff over measles

One heated exchange early in the hearing came between Kennedy and Rep. Linda Sanchez. The California Democrat decried recent measles outbreaks across the U.S. and asked Kennedy to answer for the fact that under his leadership, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back public health messaging supporting vaccination.

“As a mother, this horrifies me,” Sanchez said. “Did President Trump approve your decision to end CDC’s pro-vaccine public messaging campaign?”

Kennedy repeatedly refused to answer, saying first he wanted to respond to the “misstatements that you’ve made” and later praising the Trump administration’s record on preventing measles, although protections against the disease have eroded in some parts of the country as vaccination rates have dropped.

“That’s not answering my question,” Sanchez said as the two talked over each other.

But Sanchez also got Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered politics, to acknowledge that a 6-year-old who died of measles last year in West Texas could have potentially been saved with vaccination.

“Do you agree with the majority of doctors that the measles vaccine could have saved that child’s life in Texas?” she asked.

“It’s possible, certainly,” Kennedy said.

RFK Jr. denies talking about Black children being ‘re-parented’

A fight erupted between Kennedy and Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat from Alabama, when Kennedy vehemently denied making remarks he’d said in 2024.

The comments dated back to when Kennedy was a presidential candidate. On the “High Level Conversations” podcast last July, he said, “Psychiatric drugs — which every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

“Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a Black child?” Sewell asked, as her staff held up a poster featuring an abbreviated version of the quote.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to answer something I didn’t say.”

“You’re making stuff up,” he later claimed.

A recording of the podcast shows he made the comments during a conversation about free rehabilitation facilities he was proposing opening at the time in rural areas around the country.

Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Kennedy before joining the administration was referring to spaces where young people facing alienation, mental health challenges and despair could get re-parented, which she said was a psychotherapy term for “developing the emotional regulation, discipline, boundaries, and self-worth that may not have been established in childhood.”

For Kennedy and his former party, civility is the exception

Kennedy spent most of his life as a Democrat, the scion of one of the nation’s most famous political families. Both Republicans and Democrats during the hearing began their remarks by expressing their admiration of Kennedy’s relatives, among them former President John F. Kennedy.

But again and again throughout Thursday’s hearing, the fraying of bonds between Kennedy and his former party was on full display as spiteful comments were passed back and forth.

The Health secretary grew defensive and visibly agitated. He repeatedly criticized Democratic lawmakers for not giving him a word in edgewise.

“They’ve all shut me up,” Kennedy said at one point. “They give a little speech that they can go and market, you know, for fundraising, and they don’t allow me to answer the question.”

On a few rare occasions, the exchanges were civil. One representative, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, used humor to make that happen.

“I promise to give you easy, comfortable questions if you don’t yell at me and hurt my feelings,” she told Kennedy. He promised he wouldn’t.

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.