WORCESTER — Residents left their apartments in a haste Wednesday morning as the Worcester Police Department SWAT Team evacuated a three-floor building on East Kendall Street, where a first-floor resident had barricaded himself from authorities.

At 10:39 a.m., police attempted to serve an arrest warrant to a 50-year-old male at 5 East Kendall St. for five counts, including suffocation and strangulation, and kidnapping from events in January, April and May involving his significant other.

The suspect refused to leave his apartment and barricaded himself at apartment 1B, starting a standoff during which the Police Departmet Hostage Negotiation Team contacted the male suspect on the phone and tried to persuade him to surrender.

Access to the area, off Belmont Street, was blocked while K-9 and SWAT teams stood by with automatic weapons on adjacent Eastern Avenue, where men, women and children — the suspect's neighbors — waited patiently under the shade of trees that lined the street.

Emergency medical services were also available. 

After a two-hour and 40-minute standoff, the SWAT Team entered the building from a back door shortly after 1 p.m., and located the suspect hiding in the closet of his apartment with the intervention of K-9 forces.

No shots were exchanged and the suspect was brought into custody with little resistance, according to Worcester police spokesman Lt. Sean Murtha.

Authorities also found a .22-caliber rifle in the apartment for which the suspect didn't have a license, according to Murtha.

The suspect will be arraigned Thursday and is expected to be charged with the charges on the arrest warrant, carrying an unlicensed rifle, and with counts relating to the event Wednesday, according to Murtha.

One day after the passing of a K-9 officer in Fitchburg from a shooting Tuesday, Murtha remarked about the use of K-9 forces Wednesday.

"They're incredibly valuable," Murtha said. "In a case like this, if we open that closet door, obviously everybody gets startled (because) who knows what might happen if he has a weapon in there.

"The K-9 was able to indicate that he was in there so we knew going in that that's where he was likely to be so it just gives us more information to make our job safer."

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