When officers knocked on the door, a woman answered but would not let officers inside and a man later identified as Gene Edmund Batchford Jr. shouted “you don’t want to come in here … I’ve got guns and bombs,” the report stated.
The officers backed away and activated the Kettering Regional special weapons and tactics team when they were “immediately confronted with threats of violence and allegations of guns and bombs in the rooms,” Sgt. Andy Parish said on Sunday.
The Dayton Police Department bomb squad also responded to the motel but no guns or bombs were found.
Credit: Montgomery County Jail
Credit: Montgomery County Jail
Hostage negotiators communicated for about three hours back and forth with Blatchford while he was in the room. He eventually came out of the motel room and surrendered peacefully, along with the woman who was in the room with him.
Blatchford has not been formally charged in Sunday’s standoff. He remains held without bond in the Montgomery County Jail.
Parish described the woman, identified in the report as 22-year-old Shawna Marie Blanton of Xenia, as an accomplice and said she was taken into custody. She remains held in the Montgomery County Jail in a 2019 misdemeanor drug case. She also has not formally been charged in Sunday’s standoff, jail records show.
Credit: Montgomery County Jail
Credit: Montgomery County Jail
The motel had to be evacuated for the safety of other guests had to be evacuated for the safety of other guests staying in about 15 to 20 rooms, the report stated.
One of the guests who was standing across the street during the standoff is accused of flicking a lit cigarette at another motel guest. An officer reported that he saw the suspect, Dareon S. Johnson, 30, of Harrison Twp., flick the cigarette, and that the victim, a 39-year-old Moraine man, told police he felt a burning sensation when it struck him. The victim said Johnson flicked the cigarette at him after he told him to be quiet when he had been complaining and berating the police aloud, the report stated.
Johnson was arrested on suspicion of misconduct at an emergency and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors, and was booked into the Montgomery County Jail. He is not listed as an inmate as of Monday evening.
