Durham police hunt assault suspect

Apartment stormed, but no one home

DURHAM -- Police looking for an assault suspect shut down several blocks of a Durham neighborhood Wednesday. They fired tear gas into an apartment and stormed into the building but found no one home.

Officers with an armored truck could be heard calling a man’s name over a loudspeaker, asking him to leave an apartment in the McDougal Terrace public housing neighborhood with his hands up.

Police later fired 16 rounds of tear gas into the apartment near the intersection of Ridgeway Avenue and Wabash Street. They stormed in around 3:40 p.m.

Durham police spokeswoman Kim Walker said the officers were attempting to serve a warrant for an aggravated assault from August. She said the suspect was also wanted for discharging a firearm in city limits, firing into an occupied building and failure to appear on a stolen vehicle charge. She did not provide his name.

Earlier Wednesday, Walker said the standoff was related to a fatal shooting Tuesday night in Durham. But no warrants have been issued related to Tuesday’s shooting, and no suspects have been named, she later said.

At 8:42 p.m. Tuesday, Durham police were called to 1310 Juniper St. and found a man who had been shot in the abdomen. He was transported to Duke Hospital in critical condition and died overnight, Walker said. His name has not been released.

At about the same time that Durham police found the man on Juniper Street, officers also found a man nearby at 1200 N. Hyde Park Ave. who had been shot in the hand. His injury was not life-threatening, police said.

It was not clear whether the two shootings were related.