14-hour Texas standoff ends with suspect in custody, 3 people wounded, young hostage unharmed

Thursday, October 5th 2006, 6:05 am

By: News On 6

FOREST HILL, Texas (AP) _ A nearly 14-hour standoff between police and a man accused of shooting three people and taking a young boy hostage ended at dawn Thursday with the boy safe and the suspect in custody.

Police in the Fort Worth suburb of Forest Hill arrested Joe Dixon, 57, on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, Lt. Chris Hebert said.

The boy, described as a 4-year-old nephew of someone who lived in the house, was found unharmed and placed in the custody of an unidentified guardian, Hebert said. He said the child had been in the house with Dixon throughout the standoff but asleep during much of it.

Brenda Jackson said the dispute started with an argument between her 43-year-old sister and Dixon. She told The Dallas Morning News that she confronted Dixon and that he told her: ``If y'all call police, it's gonna be a war.''

Then, she said, ``he was standing next door to my yard, and everybody who was outside was shot.''

Police arrived to find the victims, at least one of them critically injured, and the suspect barricade inside a house with the boy and two guns, Hebert said.

SWAT teams surrounded the area and evacuated other homes within a block. Broadcast video showed police leading several children from the back of a home and then across open fields. Several wounded adults were taken to ambulances by the same route.

Hebert said authorities had established ``sporadic'' contact with the gunman during the standoff. Around midnight, police broke a window and threw a cellular phone inside to facilitate further negotiations, and those talks led to the surrender, he said.

An official at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth said a woman from the area, Tonya Gilstrap, was hospitalized there in fair condition. Gilstrap's husband, Alfredo Bueno, said his wife was injured in the back and the head, apparently from the spray of a shotgun blast.

The extent of her injuries and the conditions of the others were not immediately released.