58° SUNNY, SONOMA
Domestic dispute ends in gunfire
Last Modified: Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 11:58 a.m.
A 2½-hour standoff between a domestic violence suspect and Sonoma County Sheriff's Special Operations Unit ended Tuesday night with shots fired and a 23-year-old Sonoma man in jail.
Sonoma police took a domestic violence report Tuesday afternoon from a woman with visible injuries who said the suspect, Sam Heyerly, had attacked her. She said he had also threatened to kill her and her parents and that he had firearms, Sonoma police Sgt. Clint Shubel said.
According to authorities, when police and deputies arrived at Heyerly's home on Orange Avenue in Sonoma at 8:26 p.m, he barricaded himself inside and fired a shot. Heyerly briefly ran outside, yelled at deputies and returned to the house, Shubel said.
The standoff continued until 11:10 p.m. when Heyerly was spotted in the home's back yard and taken into custody. He was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence, making terrorist threats, resisting arrest, damaging a phone and discharging a gun in a negligent manner. His bail was set at $300,000.
-- Laura Norton
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Comments
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August 7, 2008 5:55:13 am
RE: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080807/NEWS/808070407
I didn't know damaging a phone was a crime.
August 7, 2008 8:35:27 am
that must be the funniest crap i've read this morning.....charged with damaging a phone!!! )
August 7, 2008 8:40:10 am
Yeep damaging a phone...goes back to when you rented your phone from the phone company. The police and DA love it in a domestic violence case, cause it's the one that gets thrown out and the rest sticks.
August 7, 2008 8:42:52 am
California Penal Code 591
August 7, 2008 10:04:07 am
Surprised to see they didn't follow their usual MO and kill the guy. Possibly the budget shortfalls from all the overtime and 'compensation for time spent putting on their uniforms' is cutting into their budget for bullets??
August 7, 2008 10:40:45 am
It says this happened Tuesday........today Thursday! Why the delay....
August 7, 2008 10:42:28 am
I was arrested for damaging MY OWN PHONE in MY OWN HOME, but the charge (the only charge against me) was later dropped. However, it did cost me the following: $1000 to post bail, $2500 for a lawyer (big waste), time missed from work to attend 4 (yes, FOUR) court appearances. Complete and total B.S.!! Yet, if I were an illegal (rather than a Caucasian, tax paying, self-reliant citizen), they simply would have had a good chuckle, and then left "the scene of the crime". Welcome to freakin' Sonoma County (please check your wallet at the county line)!
August 7, 2008 11:21:41 am
The sections on damaging telephone equipment have long been used by law enforcement as a tool to temporarily seperate parties in on-going domestic beefs when there is no actually battery or corporal injury committed against one party or the other and no one is willing to leave for a cooling off period.
Yeah the charge most often gets dropped, and is a major PITA as tinahdans notes above, but there is the notion that whomever was mad enough to damage the phone might get mad enough the next time to damage their spouse / domestic partner physically. If getting hooked up for a chicken-bleep destruction of phone charge makes the rager think twice next time, then I'd say it's a cheap lesson learned.
Or would it be better to just let things escalate until someone has to get hurt and the other party catches a felony for it?
August 7, 2008 11:55:18 am
Good post.
Thanks
It does sound like an archaic hold over law from the days when we all rented our phones and you had to worry about the Ringer Equivalence Number whenever you added another phone to your system.
August 7, 2008 12:37:07 pm
591 PC relates to a person who damages a phone line for the purpose of preventing someone from calling for help. A common tactic employed by wife beaters such as this POS is to cut the phone line, damage the phone, etc so that their victims can't call 911. Google "power and control" related to domestic violence.
I'm sure if this guy was victimizing your family, you'd want all of the appropriate crimes charged.
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