Arrest ends SWAT officers' standoff in Cocoa Beach - Florida Today
COCOA BEACH — At about 6:30 a.m. Monday, James Varnadoe walked outside to smoke a cigarette on his porch in the pre-dawn darkness before getting his first-grade son, Luis, ready for school.
That's when he said Stephen Downey, his erratically behaving neighbor in Unit 10 of The Courtyards apartments, shined a light at him and threatened to stab him.
"He was beet-red, yelling and screaming and waving the knife around and threatening to cut me up," Varnadoe recalled.
"I was fearful that the guy was going to cut me up or attack my son," he said.
Varnadoe called 9-1-1 — and Downey tried to slash the Cocoa Beach police officer who responded to the scene, Maj. Jay Harmon said.
A morning-long standoff at complex ensued after Downey barricaded himself inside his apartment, which is at South Orlando Avenue and Fourth Street South. He even donned a gas mask to fend off tear gas deployed by camouflaged SWAT-team members, Harmon said.
The standoff ended about 11:45 a.m. when SWAT officers entered the ground-level apartment and shot Downey with a Taser, Harmon said. Downey was arrested, placed shirtless in the back of a cruiser, and taken to Cape Canaveral Hospital for evaluation and to remove an embedded Taser probe.
No bullets were fired and no other injuries were reported during the standoff, which snarled southbound State Road A1A traffic, locked down nearby Freedom 7 Elementary, and attracted dozens of neighborhood spectators.
"I've never seen anything like this since I was back a long way away from here," Steve Cole, who served a combat stint in Vietnam from 1966-68, said from a nearby sidewalk while watching flak-jacketed officers patrol the property.
Downey faces charges of aggravated assault, aggravated assault on a law-enforcement officer and resisting officers with violence. The 43-year-old was transported to the Brevard County Jail Complex and held on $90,000 bond.
Harmon said Downey had an altercation with a Cocoa Beach police officer who responded to Varnadoe's 9-1-1 call. Then Downey slammed his apartment door shut and refused to open it.
Mark McConnell has lived at The Courtyards about three years. He said Downey stopped taking medications, and his behavior became erratic and escalated out of control the past two weeks.
Sunday, McConnell collected petition signatures from neighbors asking their landlord to evict Downey.
"He went from being a friendly guy to talking all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories," he said.
The SWAT team deployed a wheeled remote-control robot during the incident. Harmon said negotiations proved unsuccessful, and all three of Downey's windows had shattered by the end of the standoff.
18 Oct, 2011--
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