3 Police Officers Taken Hostage in Detroit-Area Motel

In a hail of gunfire from automatic weapons, three police officers on a routine call were taken hostage late Thursday by a mother and her four sons, who then barricaded themselves in a run-down motel in this depressed Detroit suburb.

As hundreds of area police and FBI agents blocked off passing traffic on the main avenue through town, law enforcement officials said they did not know whether the three officers were still alive.

The police said they had only sporadic contact with the gunmen and their mother, but had not been allowed to talk to the hostages. The woman assured police that the three officers were not dead, but apparently offered negotiators no proof.

“The mother said they are OK, but we have no idea how the officers are doing,” said Gary Lorenzen, an Inkster police officer.

The incident, which appeared to have bogged down into a standoff late Thursday night, began after an attempt by Inkster police to serve the woman with a felony warrant for allegedly passing bad checks.

There apparently was no warning that the woman might resist. “We took it to be a normal call,” Lorenzen said.

Two patrolmen went to serve the warrant, and then called for their supervisor to assist them. But after all three officers had entered the motel room of the unidentified woman and her family, the motel manager heard about 20 shots and called Inkster police. Four more officers were then met by machine-gun fire as they approached the motel.

Inkster Police Chief James Buckley said the woman, apparently in her 60s, and her sons appeared to be armed with several automatic rifles and handguns.

Wayne County Sheriff Robert Ficano refused to identify the hostages, who included one Inskter police sergeant and two patrolmen. He stressed that negotiations were continuing, but did not say whether the woman had made any demands.

Ficano said police did not know why the woman and her sons responded so violently to the arrest warrant.

Other police on the scene said the family seemed to be using furniture to block off the windows in two adjacent rooms on the first floor of the Bungalow Motel, a two-story motel along a decaying strip of Michigan Avenue, the main street through Inkster.

A local television reporter who spoke with the woman by telephone, at her request, said she claimed that she was upset because she had been swindled out of a multimillion-dollar investment, leading to her passing bad checks.

Minister Asked to Negotiate

After the reporter was unable to convince her to surrender, a leading Detroit minister, the Rev. James Holley, was asked to try to negotiate. It was unclear whether he had been able to talk with the woman.

Huge Crowd Gathers

One of the suspects reportedly asked to meet with Detroit Mayor Coleman Young.

Meanwhile, a huge crowd milling about the closed street threatened to give the hostage crisis a carnival-like atmosphere, and at least one fight broke out in front of police lines.