Dispute results in SWAT team standoff, RV fire

KIRO 7’s Tracy Taylor witnessed firsthand the 7 a.m. SoDo dispute that resulted in an RV fire and a SWAT team showdown on Tuesday. She told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that it “escalated quickly.”

She and her colleagues were covering a different story in the area when they noticed 11 Seattle police cars surround an RV parked at Airport Way South and South Dakota Street.

Then, “all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a SWAT team arrives,” she said.

The SWAT team surrounded the RV, Taylor said, trying to get a man inside the RV to come outside.

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“He decided to ram one of the SWAT vehicles … and so that’s when the SWAT team deployed some tear gas,” she said.

Still the man refused to come out, and Taylor said that she could hear his yells from where she was standing across the street.

“Next thing you know it, from the top of the air conditioner on the RV there was a black plume of smoke,” she said. “And sure enough, it was fully-engulfed.”

Using K9 forces, the SWAT team pulled the man out of the RV.

Video footage of the RV fire can be seen on Taylor’s Twitter page.

“It must have been bad, whatever they were coming after, because there are so many of these RVs [around Seattle] … and they don’t care about any of that,” Dori commented. “And yet, for the SWAT team to come out, I just wonder what they had on this guy.”

Taylor said that the man violated a court order by going to see a woman who lived in the RV. The woman reportedly told police that the man had told her he had gasoline with him and threatened to burn down her RV.

In Taylor’s view, the vehicle did not look like the sort that tend to be filled with drug use.

“It actually just looked like a normal RV — it wasn’t of the newer sort, it was more of an older one,” she said.

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