INDIANAPOLIS — An officer-involved shooting took the life of a man armed with a gun, a knife and a machete inside a house on the city’s southwest side late Sunday morning, but saved the life of a woman held hostage.
The address in the 500 block of S. Holt Road was familiar to officers who had visited the location eight times in the last 13 months on a variety of domestic violence, theft, drug and suicidal threat runs.
“They’ve been here I don’t know how many times because of him. I even called them a few times,” said neighbor Michelle Boucher. “Banging on doors. Throwing rocks at windows. Yelling at her to open…last night I should’ve called when I heard him yelling, ‘Open the door, B….’.”
Boucher said the 2:30 a.m. disturbance was accompanied by gunfire and the discovery of a shell casing on her property Sunday morning.
“You could hear them arguing loudly in the house and then the next thing I know the dogs let me know there are policemen walking through my yard with guns, rifles, bulletproof vests on,” said Boucher who had carried on several conversations with the woman next door over the last year. “She’s a very nice person. She’s been trying to get this guy out of her life. Trying to rectify things and he just keeps making it more and more difficult because every time he was here, the police would show up.
“He was abusive to her.”
Late in August, the Marion County Prosecutor moved to successfully dismiss four domestic violence charges against the man for unknown reasons.
He was currently facing pending methamphetamine charges.
It was just after 10 a.m. when police officers were called yet again to the house on Holt Road.
“They encountered a female outside the residence at 524 who stated that her female roommate was being held hostage in a bedroom inside the residence by her boyfriend who was also armed with a handgun,” said IMPD Sgt. Genae Cook. “SWAT team members continued to negotiate. Negotiators were here. This went on for some time. At a certain point, a gunshot was heard from inside the bedroom. To protect the safety of the hostage, SWAT team members immediately entered the bedroom where they engaged the suspect. At least four officers fired their department-issued weapons, striking the suspect. And then simultaneously they then grabbed the hostage and removed her from the situation and took her to a safe location outside the residence.”
Each officer was equipped with body-worn cameras and that video is being downloaded and analyzed.
“SWAT team members immediately made entry into that residence after the shot was fired. They did not wait,” said Cook. “Preliminary investigation leads us to believe that he did have a weapon and he did not want to come out of the room.”
IMPD detectives are attempting to confirm that the man made suicidal threats to family members before he was killed by police gunfire.
He was later identified by the Marion County Coroner’s Office as Thomas Talley, 40.
Family members told Fox59 News that while they, too, are awaiting the results of the investigation to determine what happened, they pointed out Talley was a father and a brother and the family asks for privacy.
