Woman in 25-Hour Standoff Arrested : Law enforcement: Deputies capture the distraught operator of a board-and-care facility. She allegedly had shot and wounded a boarder.

After a 25-hour standoff, sheriff’s deputies stormed into an Athens home Friday and captured a distraught woman who allegedly had wounded a female boarder the day before.

A SWAT team used a “flash-bang” device to distract Juanita Kaigler, 52, then managed to get inside the house early Friday evening.

Kaigler scurried to another room and locked herself in a closet, but Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies managed to remove her shortly before 6:30 p.m. She was unarmed at the time and deputies said they found no gun during a preliminary search of her home.

“She will be taken to a local hospital for a medical evaluation, then booked for attempted murder, which has no bail,” Sheriff’s Department spokesman Rich Erickson said.

The standoff began just before 6 p.m. Thursday after an argument broke out between Kaigler, the operator of a licensed board-and-care home, and a 38-year-old male boarder, sheriff’s officials said.

Kaigler, described as a mother of four who had been extremely depressed for the past five months, apparently intended to shoot the man but hit the woman instead, deputies said.

As Kaigler went to reload her weapon, the man and the woman fled the house. They called the Sheriff’s Department, which sent a crisis negotiation and special weapons team. Deputies evacuated about 50 residents from 12 homes in the area.

The wounded woman, identified only as a 35-year-old resident of Kaigler’s board-and-care home, was taken to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and released.

Negotiators made numerous attempts to talk with Kaigler by phone, with little success.

“She’s hanging up constantly,” Deputy Larry Mead said. “There’s very little exchange.”

All that negotiators were able to glean from Kaigler was that she felt extreme “frustration and anger,” he said.

At one point, Kaigler’s minister, Gentry Richardson, and her 20-year-old daughter, Kerry Williams, made televised appeals for Kaigler to leave the house. Using a loudspeaker, deputies urged Kaigler to turn on her television, but there was no response.

“We told her everyone is here to help her. We love her. We need her,” Richardson said.

Deputies also played taped appeals from friends and relatives over the loudspeaker in another effort to coax the woman from her home.

According to Richardson, Kaigler recently said that she was possessed by a demon.

One of her daughters, Karen Theus, said she had twice taken her mother to a psychiatrist this year, but her mother was uncooperative.

“She says little riddles you have to piece together,” Theus said.

Kaigler told deputies at one point that she was distraught over attempts to foreclose on her home. But Theus said her mother has no current financial problems.