Suspected Sheridan Cop Killer Remains Barricaded In House As Standoff Nears 24 Hours

UPDATE 3:15pm: Suspect In Sheridan Cop Killing Was Squatting In Rental House

12 Noon Update: Standoff In Sheridan, Wyoming Continues: Suspected Reportedly Shoots At Cops

UPDATE: 10:23 a.m. Wednesday: ‘Come Out The Front Door!’ Standoff With Suspected Sheridan Cop Killer Hits 24-Hours

As Wyoming grieves for the city of Sheridan and its police force less than 24 hours after Sgt. Nevada Krinkee became the first Sheridan Police Department officer to be killed in the line of duty, the man suspected of shooting and killing him remains barricaded in a house surrounded by a small army of tactical and other officers.

The suspect, identified in an early bulletin after the shooting as 46-year-old William Lowery, has been in an armed standoff with officers from a host of Wyoming agencies, including a tactical team from Gillette, Wyoming Highway Patrol officers and the Sheridan PD since about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.

As of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, the police presence remains surrounding the house.

That follows hours of attempts Tuesday afternoon and evening to breach the house near 6th Street and North Sheridan Avenue with gas bombs and flash-bang devices, send in a tactical robot and an agreement by Lowery at one point to surrender, on which he didn’t follow through.

Cowboy State Daily had two reporters on the scene throughout much of the standoff and another monitoring the local police scanner and reporting until late into the evening.

For this picturesque Wyoming town of 20,000, people were waking up Wednesday to a different Sheridan.

Since the shooting and brief manhunt, and throughout a standoff that continues more than 20 hours after it began, people here are shocked, saddened and haven’t fully processed that someone who protected them for more than six years has been taken from them.

Sheridan Mourns

Neon lights line Main Street’s historic brick buildings in this prototypical Wyoming town on the highway between Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore.

It’s nestled in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains and has one of the state’s most famous watering holes, The Mint Bar, and the Sheridan Inn Hotel where author Ernest Hemingway put the finishing touches on “A Farewell to Arms.”

Now the town's reeling with the news that Krinkee was gunned down while trying to serve a trespass warning on a man near the intersection of 5th and Val Vista streets in the downtown area.

The suspect, Lowery, fled and barricaded himself in a nearby home with police cars from all corners of Wyoming barricading the area to traffic in a two-block radius around it.

As the sun rose Wednesday morning, law enforcement officers wearing tactical helmets and body armor and rifles in hand waited tensely for a resolution.

Several streets near the vicinity of the standoff remained barricaded more than 20 hours after the incident's beginning. Lowery was still alive inside the home, so far intractable.

The officers themselves kept their composure while grappling with the heightened emotions of tragic circumstances. The Sheridan Police Department dispatched a grief-riddled announcement Tuesday calling the act "senseless."

Laid Back And Chill

At the Holiday Gas station along North Main Street, clerk Timothy Sitzberger didn’t piece it together that the suspect was the same person who regularly dropped in at 1 or 2 a.m. to buy a 12-ounce bottle of Coke to mix with his fifth of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

He'd sometimes buy two bottles.

Sitzberger had listened to the police scanner app on his cellphone most of the day about the shooting near his work, never thinking for a moment that the suspect who shot and killed Krinkee was the one he chatted up during his night shift.

“I saw him the last couple of months every Tuesday at about 2 or 3 in the morning,” he said. “I recognized right away after my friend at work started to describe him. He was very friendly, always very friendly.”

Near midnight Tuesday, Sitzberger got busy with a flurry of customers, ringing up energy drinks, sodas and cigarettes.

“I never had a problem with him,” he said. “He was just a laid-back, chill guy.”

Across the street at the No Name Bar at the corner of North Main and East Fifth Street, bartender Riley Gilkey said that he had spotted the suspect a few times at the corner bar.

“I’ve seen him around town,” Gilkey said of Lowery, who sported a neatly trimmed, graying goatee beard.

“It’s utterly shocking to see this in your community,” Gilkey said. “Things do occur here, but never such a high-profile crime like this.”

Hardly Ever

Brothers Camden, 16, Esko, 18, and Kyan Rosenlund, 19, piled into their their 2003 Chevy 2500 Duramax diesel truck for two hours Tuesday evening trying to get a glimpse of what they thought would be the suspect’s apprehension.

“My co-worker heard the gunshot, and we began looking on Facebook,” said Kyan Rosenlund, who works at ProWeld Fab & Machine LLC along North Custer Street.

The brothers, who attend the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church along Old Metz Road, paid their respects to the fallen officer.

“He has been definitely in our thoughts and prayers,” the oldest Rosenlund brother said.

Camden Rosenlund was in his fourth period class at Sheridan High School when Principal Scott Cleland interrupted with a midmorning (10:30 a.m.) announcement on the intercom that the campus was locking down because of the shooting.

“Everything turned into a madhouse after that,” he said.

Middle brother Esko was framing a house at a worksite when he heard of the shooting.

“I was surprised,” he said.

All three bothers hooked up, drove over in Esko’s truck and parked in a lot across from Otts Memorial Park, and just made small talk, checking their Facebook pages Sheridan UpCycle and Sheridan WY Rants and Raves for the latest.

They parked their truck at the corner of Saberton Avenue and East 7th Street, about three blocks from the suspect’s house.

“He was a well-liked cop,” Kyan Rosenlund said. ”You don’t hardly ever see crime here. This is why this is such a big deal.”

At the other end of the street, high school student Jaden Picard and his friends watched the standoff from a pickup, listening to a scanner to follow unseen events in real time. As one comes to expect in a Wyoming community, Picard and many others had a personal connection to the tragic events unfolding in their hometown.

“My mom’s friend is (Lowery’s) ex-wife,” he said. “I've been told a lot of things about him. The reason he's doing this is because he was getting evicted. He has a lot of pet snakes, and they said they wanted to kill snakes and stuff like that. I think that's what upset him this morning.”

Picard had been watching the scene since 3:30 p.m. Tuesday. For he and his friends, this was another escalation in their perception that there was violent crimes in Sheridan were becoming more common.

“It's just crazy,” said Emma van Hill, watching from the top of the pickup. “You think this town is safe because it's a small town, and the communities are close. But something like this can still happen. Just a lot to think about.”

He Knows They're There

Titan Abeyta, a U.S. Army veteran, was simultaneously listening in on his scanner while analyzing the tactical approach of the law enforcement officers.

“They have a battering ram on the front of that vehicle,” he said. “It’s used to take out objects that are in the way of where they can't put a person. It’s about 32 feet long, and they use it to push the door open or through the house to clear walls, windows or anything like that. So, what they're trying to do is they were trying to clear out objects, so they could either get a spotlight or a drone in there.”

Abeyta reflected on the predicament the officers faced that evening. Even with his military training, he recognized the heightened danger of the standoff.

“Whenever you're on deployment,” he said, “we go house to house in the middle of the night when everybody doesn't expect anybody to be awake. The enemy doesn't know you're there. This guy knows that the police are there. They were there for him.”

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com and Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.