Maryland Hostage Siege Drags On Into Third Night (March 20, 2000)
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
WASHINGTON, March 21 -- Three hostages were rushed to freedom tonight in a Baltimore suburb as the police broke in on a fugitive murder suspect and shot him to death, ending a harrowing four-day siege that terrorized the Dundalk neighborhood.
The fugitive, Joseph C. Palczynski, a former convict with a history of mental illness, was shot by the police who broke into the apartment after seeing two of the hostages run for freedom after the suspect fell asleep.
Mr. Palczynski had been the subject of a furious manhunt since March 7 when, the authorities say, he shot to death three people after he angrily confronted his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, for bringing domestic abuse charges against him.
Two of the hostages, Lynn Whitehead and her boyfriend, Andy McCord, climbed from a window in the darkness before 11 p.m. as the fugitive slept on a couch. Their 12-year-old son, Bradley, was left behind, asleep in the kitchen as Mrs. Whitehead, who is Tracy Whitehead's mother, rushed to find police assistance.
Within minutes, the police in paramilitary gear rushed the house on Lange Street and gunfire erupted. They rescued the boy and shortly thereafter announced an end to the siege.
"Joseph Palczynski is dead," declared a police spokesman, Bill Toohey, at the end of the siege, which had exhausted the working-class neighborhood as residents in a four-block-square area were trapped in their houses.
The 31-year-old suspect, accused of killing four people in the past two weeks, had been lost by police officers in woodlands until he invaded the suburban home last Friday in a burst of gunfire.
Mr. Palczynski, an unemployed electrician with a history of domestic violence and prison and hospital incarceration, had been obsessively following the standoff on television, according to the Baltimore County police. At the request of the police, news broadcasters had gingerly tried to avoid inciting him.
Soon after his death was announced, a television station released what it said were tape recordings of telephone calls that Mr. Palczynski had made during the siege in which he complained that the police negotiators had prevented him from talking to Tracy Whitehead. In a desperate tone, the voice described as Mr. Palczynski's says: "All I want to do is talk to Tracy. I love her dearly. I did not mean to kill those people."
The fugitive fatally shot two of Mrs. Whitehead's friends and a neighbor who came to their aid on March 7, according to the police, and then killed a woman during a car-jacking in his flight from the police.
Mr. Palczynski's friends and family said he suffered from bipolar disorder, a manic-depressive behavior that they say resulted from a severe blow to the head in a school bus accident when he was a teenager.
Since then he had served three years in mental institutions and two years in prison, plus several years' probation for incidents usually involving the beatings of girlfriends.
The siege ended after four anxious days in which the suspect repeatedly shot at armored police cars and into the air around the apartment amid sporadic negotiations with the police. He had been armed with at least three weapons, and as the siege continued neighborhood life was reduced to the breaking point.
Cheers could be heard from one corner of the neighborhood when the slaying of Mr. Palczynski was announced.
The Whitehead family was jubilant in the midnight rain as they rushed to the police headquarters to greet the hostages. At least four dozen police officers had been stationed around the apartment, with sniper scopes and listening devices trained on the scene.
Officials, pleased that the three hostages were not harmed, said the one casualty beyond Mr. Palczynski was a neighborhood dog that threatened the police and had to be shot.
"Bradley's looking forward to playing baseball," Mr. McCord told a relative as they celebrated the end of the siege.