Trapdoor provides no escape for assault suspect

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June 30, 2008

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Mon Jun 30, 2008, 09:46 PM CDT

By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

A Newton County man’s standoff with the law Monday morning demonstrates that trapdoors — as escape routes go — can sometimes leave something to be desired.

Like an actual way out.

Sheriff’s deputies went to 11427 Crow Road, northwest of Racine, about 10 a.m. Monday, hoping to find Rickey L. Sarazin, 44, back at his house and arrest him for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend with a two-by-four the previous day.

Sure enough, Sarazin had come back out of the woods, where he reportedly fled Sunday morning when deputies first were called to the address. This time, the suspect had barricaded himself inside his home.

Newton County Sheriff Ken Copeland said deputies had reason to be cautious.

“All morning (Sunday), he’d been calling his girlfriend (on a cell phone) and telling her he was going to kill her and her child,” the sheriff said.

The girlfriend consequently spent Sunday night elsewhere, he said.

“She was afraid he would follow through on that,” Copeland said.

Sarazin also reportedly had been threatening, to the girlfriend and others, to shoot it out with the deputies, the sheriff said. He allegedly had declared that he would not be taken alive, the sheriff said.

To the Sheriff’s Department, Sarazin seemed to possess something of a “survivalist” mentality and was believed to be in possession of weapons, Copeland said. The suspect had closed-circuit television cameras rigged up to monitor the approaches to his home, he said.

Numerous attempts to contact Sarazin by telephone and loudspeaker from outside the home Monday morning went unanswered, Copeland said. Deputies next shot tear-gas canisters through several windows of the residence.

“He still failed to come out,” the sheriff said. “So our special-response team then made entry into the house.”

To their surprise, the officers could not at first find Sarazin inside. He appeared to have mysteriously escaped, the sheriff said. Then officers happened to find a trapdoor in the floor of the house beneath a table leg, he said. The suspect had used fishing line tied to a table leg to pull the furniture over the trapdoor from below, he said.

As it turned out, the trapdoor did not lead to any actual exit from the house, the sheriff said. Tear gas was sent down into the hole, and that flushed the suspect out, he said. Sarazin was taken into custody about 1:35 p.m.

In custody

Rickey Sarazin remained in custody Monday night at the Newton County Jail in Neosho on a charge of second-degree domestic assault.

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Trapdoor provides no escape for assault suspect

Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr wants the city to distribute weather radios to all Joplin homes that don’t have one. That’s 11,000 radios. Do you think that’s a good use of $300,440?

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