INDIANAPOLIS — A man with an AR-15-style rifle allegedly fired a shot at a woman in a road rage incident in Broad Ripple Wednesday morning.
No one was hurt, but the shooting led to an hourslong SWAT standoff at a rental property with two convicted felons who are not supposed to have a gun.
A woman told police she was driving north on Keystone Avenue on Jan. 10 around 9 a.m. when a charter bus moved over into her lane. She honked at the bus. At the 38th Street stoplight, she said the man driving the empty bus allegedly yelled at the woman and threw things at her Chevy Tahoe. Further up Keystone Avenue, the woman said the bus moved into her lane and struck the passenger side of her SUV, causing damage.
She followed the bus to Broad Ripple to get the license plate information, down the alley behind Broad Ripple Avenue off Evanston Avenue.
Court records say surveillance video from the rental property owner shows the driver of the bus run to the back door of the residence. Another man answers, and the driver runs back toward the bus with a rifle. A single gunshot can be heard on the video.
The driver of the SUV showed police her own cellphone video of the driver of the bus with a gun. She said when that gun was pointed at her, she ducked under the dash and heard a shot fired.
Chris Aasen, the owner of Broad Ripple Lock Service, heard the shot from his office next door.
“I saw him hand his weapon off to somebody inside the (rental property), and he got back inside the bus and was coming down the alley,” said Aasen, looking out his office window.
Both men wound up back inside the residence before police arrived. A SWAT standoff lasted about six hours.
"It was like nothing we'd ever seen,” Aasen said. “There was SWAT out back in the alley, and there was SWAT out front — plenty of police officers. They were sounding the horns. They were telling him to come out, surrender, to whatever. Then, it just did never happen, obviously. So, they had to take action to go in."
One man eventually came out after several hours. He told police he did not own a gun and did not provide a gun to the alleged shooter.
The SWAT team entered and searched the residence before finding the alleged shooter hiding under the building.
"He was underneath a little unit that they kind of did an addition on,” Aasen said. “It's kind of built on a deck. It can't be more than maybe eight inches to a foot high, and he'd crawled up underneath there."
Police did not recover the gun. The alleged shooter was arrested on a probation violation out of Monroe County. Both men are held in the Marion County jail, awaiting charges for being convicted felons with a gun.
"Really odd, weird day,” Aasen said. “You never know for the safety of the neighborhood what's going to happen when a situation like that goes down."
(Editor's note: A quotation in this story was edited to clarify the rental property where the incident occurred is not listed by Airbnb, as was mentioned by a witness.)