Police in standoff — with dog

After five hours of attempted negotiations, SWAT-team maneuvers and repeated barrages of tear gas, officers stormed a North Seattle home yesterday to discover they had spent the entire morning surrounding a dog.

Police ended their standoff just after 12:30 p.m. when officers swept through the house in the 14300 block of Dayton Avenue North and found no human suspects, spokesman Duane Fish said.

The SWAT team believed there was a man inside the house, possibly armed, because at about 11 a.m., they shot gas into the house and saw the door open slightly and the window blinds move, Fish said. They assumed a person inside opened the door to let in fresh air.

The dog must have pushed the door open, Fish said. It was uninjured.

If there was a person inside the house, he must have slipped away earlier in the morning, Fish said.

Police were called to the house about 7:30 a.m. by a man who said he had left the home and said shots had been fired inside. After police arrived, two women and a man came out but said no shots had been fired, Fish said. But the three didn't agree on whether a man was still inside, or whether he was armed.

Negotiators tried all morning but couldn't get anyone inside to respond, Fish said.

Police said they have visited the house before but didn't elaborate.

That standoff began less than 12 hours after Seattle police fatally shot an armed man during a standoff at a downtown hotel. The incidents were not related.

In the standoff Tuesday evening, Seattle SWAT team Officer Dan Curtis fired one bullet to kill a suicidal man at the Best Western Loyal Inn. The standoff lasted seven hours.

Shawn Charles Howell, 33, of Haywood County, N.C., had repeatedly asked police to kill him and finally stepped onto a balcony at the hotel at 2301 Eighth Ave. He pointed a pistol at officers, police spokesman Scott Moss said.

"You don't wait for him to shoot you, because it only takes a split second for him to pull the trigger," Moss said. "Once the threat is there, you have to act."

Howell had barricaded himself in his room at about 2:45 p.m. Tuesday when hotel management called and told him he had to check out, police said. When he refused, they cut off his phone. The man, apparently upset about a breakup with his wife, asked to call his mother "one last time," police said.

Hotel managers then told him they were calling police. "That would be a bad idea," police said Howell told the hotel operators.

Police swarmed to the scene, anticipating a standoff after the managers' description of Howell's mood, Moss said. Negotiators spent hours on the phone with Howell.

The standoff closed parts of Eighth Avenue, Denny Way and Dexter Avenue North for hours.

"Our hope was to exhaust him and wear him down so he'd hopefully realize what he was doing was wrong," Moss said. "But he was adamant about taking his own life. He made it very obvious that he wanted to die, regardless of how it happened."

At about 9:45 p.m., Howell went out to his room's balcony with a pistol. He went back inside and spoke to police negotiators on the phone again, then returned to the balcony and was shot, Moss said.

Curtis, 31, has been on the force since 1994 and is a longtime member of the SWAT team. He was placed on administrative leave immediately after the shooting, as is routine.