Sixteen-year-old Jensy Quintanilla was startled by the sounds of shattered glass, upended furniture and screaming when a strange man forced his way into her home Thursday morning. At the commotion, she was quick to call police for help.
The break-in at Quintanilla’s Cobb County apartment prompted a nearly six-hour standoff with SWAT officers after the man, who was not identified, barricaded himself inside and refused to come out. The girl and her family were able to escape safely, she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from outside her home Thursday.
The standoff came to an end around 8:30 a.m., when the man was taken into custody outside the Taylor Apartment Homes on Bellemeade Drive.
Credit: John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com
Credit: John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com
Cobb police responded to the apartment complex around 2:30 a.m. after getting reports of an “erratic” man pacing back and forth, throwing chairs and screaming in the complex. The man allegedly used a fire extinguisher to break into a second-floor apartment, Cobb police spokesperson Officer Shenise Barner said.
“The persons inside of the residence were able to remove themselves from the unit, and at that point the male just decided to barricade himself into the unit,” Barner said. The SWAT team was then called to negotiate with him, she said.
Quintanilla said she and her mother could hear the man yelling outside before he broke multiple windows to their apartment. When police arrived, she said they extended ladders so the family could climb down to safety.
“It was scary,” Quintanilla told the AJC as she surveyed the damage “First, I didn’t really think anything about it because he was just outside ... around 3 in the morning, after about 30 minutes of him just screaming outside, he grabbed the fire extinguisher and he hit that window over there first.”
Her family and other residents gathered at a nearby playground to watch as SWAT officers communicated with the man using a loudspeaker, telling him he was under arrest and trying to coax him out of the apartment. He surrendered peacefully and is expected to be charged with burglary, according to Barner.
“He was just having some kind of episode, whether it’s mental or emotional,” Barner said.
Besides the broken windows, Quintanilla said a television was ripped from the wall and furniture was displaced.
“He just turned everything upside down,” she said.
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
