When a Newberg, Oregon, police officer started his night shift Wednesday last week, he had no idea he’d spend five hours on the phone with a barricaded man 1,000 miles away in Riverton, Wyoming.
Police went to the Riverton home of Ron Allington, 62, at about 5 p.m. April 16 to arrest him on outstanding warrants, then things went wrong.
Allington’s elderly mother answered the door. She was removed from the home while officers went to Allington’s bedroom door and ordered him to come out, says an evidentiary affidavit that has since been filed in an aggravated assault case against the man.
“Over my dead body,” Allington answered, according to the affidavit.
The document says he also said things like, “That probation lady is lying about me” and “you’re going to have to fight me.”
Officers sprayed Allington with pepper spray using a metal wand extended under his bedroom door. They ordered him to exit again and again, the document says.
They tried to spray him a second time, but this time something blocked the wand. An officer used a Halligan breaching tool to drill a hole in the door — and Allington thrust a sword through the hole about a foot above a crouched officer’s head, says the affidavit.
The document says another officer positioned on the west side of the house saw Allington point what appeared to be a handgun at him. Law enforcement later learned this was a BB pistol.
Officers withdrew from the home and established a perimeter.
By about 6 p.m., additional deputies and officers were arriving on scene, pulling rifles from their vehicles and grabbing shields.
One Thousand Miles Away
Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in Newberg, Oregon, Allington’s cousin Melissa Wear felt something was off.
Wear told Cowboy State Daily that she knows Allington has mental health issues, but doesn’t consider him malicious.
“Never at any point did I have any concern that he’d hurt anybody that night except for himself,” she said.
Knowing Allington lives with his mother and is her caretaker, Wear keeps tabs on them both by watching Allington’s Facebook page, she said.
“Ron is typically delusional. However, when he’s in a good spot, his delusions are actually lovely,” said Wear. “He’ll post stuff about this beautiful life he leads by the ocean; surfing and beautiful women and writing songs.”
When Wear got home the night of April 16 and started doing her normal duties around the house, the thought of Allington’s more recent posts nagged at her.
He seemed to be declining, she said.
That afternoon, Allington wrote a one-sentence post that read: “Thier (sic) going to kill me.”
Wear tried to put it out of her mind. It could be just another delusion, she reasoned.
Twenty minutes later as she ate dinner and scrolled Facebook, she saw a news outlet reporting that a house on Pinecrest Street in Riverton was surrounded in a police standoff. Her best friend texted her a screenshot of that same story a short while later, Wear recalled.
“Oh, crap,” Wear thought to herself. She wondered if Allington’s mother had died, prompting him to “freak out.”
She messaged Allington on Facebook messenger.
“Hey, what’s going on? Are you OK?” asked Wear.
Allington responded instantly. The pair talked, and Wear soon called him on the messenger application.
He told her he knew police had a warrant for his arrest — but he believed the warrant was for false charges that he was harboring hard drugs like fentanyl and heroin, he said.
His arrest warrants stem, rather, from a case in which he’s accused of threatening to shoot up the local hospital and skipped his sentencing hearing, and another in which he possessed marijuana and avoided his probation agent.
Wear told Cowboy State Daily that when Allington seems to be lying, he’s actually delusional.
Get Outside
Wear realized she had to get Allington to go outside and surrender peacefully.
She reasoned with him for an hour. Sometimes she coaxed him about surrendering; sometimes she changed the subject.
Allington told her police had fired a smoke bomb through his bedroom window; it had grazed the side of his head. When he picked it up to throw it back out, he cut his head on the broken glass of the window, he told her.
He also posted to Facebook at that time that he had a deep cut on his head.
Wear wasn’t sure if that’s exactly what happened, but she plied the topic anyway.
“This is a really good reason to step outside, and get some medical attention,” Wear told her cousin.
Allington told her he’d patched up his head with a sock and a ski mask.
“It took me a little while (to figure that out) because he kept using a word I hadn’t heard for ‘ski mask,’” she recalled. When it dawned on her that the barricaded man was milling around in a possibly blood-soaked ski mask, she was alarmed.
“We need to take that off,” she said. “If you’re in a situation where you’re surrounded by people with guns, you don’t need to have a ski mask on.”
But Allington wouldn’t take it off at that time.
Three Cousins
The hours wore on.
Wear tried every tactic to get her cousin to leave his room.
She also called the Riverton Police Department to explain who she was and that she’d been speaking with Allington.
According to Wear, that was a bad experience that ended with her clashing with RPD. Capt. Wes Romero, who is a distant cousin of hers and a cousin of Allington’s.
In an email response to that claim, Riverton Police Chief Eric Hurtado noted that RPD members were also negotiating with Allington on the ground during the initial hours of the standoff.
When Allington refused to surrender, Romero tried negotiating with him through the police vehicle PA system, and phone.
Hurtado did not respond directly to Wear’s statement that her interaction with RPD went poorly.
A Tapping
Meanwhile, Allington was growing more frantic. He thought police were in his house.
A female dispatcher from RPD assured Wear that they weren’t in his house, and Wear relayed the message to her cousin.
The Natrona County Sheriff’s Office Special Response Team took command of the tactical operation at 8:45 p.m. Within that unit is a crisis negotiation team, NCSO spokeswoman Kiera Hett told Cowboy State Daily.
A crisis negotiator started giving Wear advice.
Then, Wear heard tapping at her own door.
She answered and met Newberg-Dundee Police Department Officer Jeromy Pilon, whom the Natrona County unit had called to her home.
“This man is amazing, and I firmly believe Ron is alive right now because of him,” said Wear.
Because Of The Gulf
Pilon told Cowboy State Daily that Allington’s willingness to talk to him wasn’t due to any special attribute, it was because Pilon was 1,000 miles away and couldn’t access him.
Allington has a deep distrust of law enforcement, Pilon and Wear both said in separate interviews.
It’s not unusual for Pilon to get called to help other agencies, since he’s also a K-9 handler. But he’s never worked at the behest of a Wyoming agency before, let alone all night, he said.
“That’s pretty far out of our jurisdiction,” he noted.
Pilon jumped right in. He spoke to a deputy on scene in Riverton about the nature of the standoff. He went to Wear’s home thinking he’d support and encourage her in her hours-long negotiation effort.
Suddenly, Wear asked Allington if Allington would like to talk to Pilon.
“I was like ‘woah, woah, time out,’” Pilon recalled, adding that he’s not a trained crisis negotiator.
But Allington had already agreed to talk to Pilon.
The officer asked Allington about his life, his childhood, why he distrusted police, his hobbies — “everything under the sun.”
Inside The Pocket
This was a video call.
Allington stuffed the phone into his breast pocket and started pacing around the house. Pilon took mental notes of the things he saw, and messaged those details back to the command team on scene.
By this time, Pilon was operating four phones at once: one to speak to Allington, two to communicate with the command team, and another to transmit his conversation with Allington back to the other negotiators on scene.
It was an intense, highly collaborative phone marathon, Pilon said.
Negotiators on scene texted “immediate feedback” as Pilon navigated the conversation.
Pilon kept spotting weapons: a knife in Allington’s waistband, what looked like a rifle in the bedroom.
Officers didn’t find any rifles after the standoff, but an empty black scabbard likely gave Pilon the idea that there was a rifle there, Hurtado clarified in a follow-up email.
Nope, Toss It
Just when Allington warmed up to the prospect of surrendering, Pilon had to confront him about the knife in his waistband.
“Hey, you can’t have that,” Pilon told the man. “If you have that on you they’re not going to trust you. And we need to build trust.”
But Pilon knew he had to give Allington something in return. He worked with the negotiation team to get a message from Allington’s mother to him, he recalled.
It was a moment of bargain and exchange: Allington threw the knife out the front door so that Pilon would give him the message from his mother, Wear recalled.
Learning of her safety was especially important to Allington, Wear added, because he’d convinced himself that police had “roughed up” his mother.
Breaking Glass
Pilon and Allington then heard breaking glass, and Allington descended into sheer panic mode for about 20 minutes.
Wear believed police were shooting out the windows so they could deploy tear gas.
Pilon tried to connect with Allington by showing him that the incident affected him too.
“Look, Ron, I’m sweating too. Look at my forehead,” said Pilon.
That did reassure Allington, the officer recalled.
Meanwhile, a Natrona County negotiator was on scene urging Allington to exit, promising him a hot meal and medical help. He called through the loudspeaker, over the roar of a nearby fire engine, again and again.
The temperature plummeted at about midnight, eventually yielding to snow.
Back in Oregon, Pilon’s supervisors arrived in Wear’s home and offered to get him a replacement and some reprieve. He declined.
Stalling Game Again
But then Allington retreated to the bathroom and started “playing the stalling game again,” said Pilon.
That was about 3 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time, 2 a.m. Pilon’s time.
“Ron was pretty spun up,” Pilon recalled.
Allington kept making threatening statements as if he was going to kill himself. He rushed to the kitchen and re-armed himself.
Officers later found a bloody knife in the home, according to an RPD statement.
“I watched him grabbing things, but I couldn’t see what they were because it was so fast,” said Pilon.
Allington said yes, he had grabbed knives, “and if they try to come get me it’s going to go poorly,” Pilon paraphrased.
Wear heard Allington crying and vomiting, screaming about not going back to jail, she said.
Pilon focused on calming Allington down. And it worked, but the call disconnected.
Pilon believes that, after an entire night of near-constant calls and video calls, Allington’s phone died. That was about 3:15 a.m.
One negotiator on scene told Pilon he had done well during his five-hour stretch, Pilon recalled, somewhat bashfully.
Wear put it in stronger terms: “This guy’s a f***ing hero.”
Pilon said it probably helped that he worked in probation and parole before, and has spent countless hours delving into people’s lives and histories with them.
“Being a normal person and talking to (Allington), not like a cop but like a person trying to be very rational and reasonable with him, had moments of gain — and also moments of loss,” said Pilon.
The Surrender
Over the course of the next 45 minutes, personnel on scene were able to arrange Allington’s peaceful surrender.
Pilon called it a “very solid victory,” and said he was grateful not only to help, but to build bonds with officers several hundred miles away.
He spoke highly of the personnel who were on scene that night.
“They were great,” said Pilon. “I saw no (cultural) difference. They could have been (my) next-door neighbors.”
The Wreckage
As for Wear, she’s grateful the standoff ended peacefully, but said she’s concerned about Allington, his fragile mental health and his mother going forward.
The back of the home was gouged open during the standoff. The home is registered to Allington’s mother.
While the prevailing legal thought is that cities don’t have a constitutional obligation to reimburse homeowners for damage police incur while trying to get barricaded subjects out of people’s homes, at least one Wyoming city, Sheridan, stepped up and reimbursed an innocent homeowner in the recent past anyway.
Given the chance to galvanize the lawscape on this last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined, saying it should "percolate" more in the lower courts.
Riverton Mayor Tim Hancock did not respond by Friday to an April 18 phone call and text message request for comment on that topic.
All told, Allington faces two counts of aggravated assault (punishable by up to 10 years in prison each), one count of possessing a deadly weapon with unlawful intend (up to five years in prison), one count of reckless endangering (up to one year in jail) and police interference (up to one year in jail). Those counts also carry the potential for fines.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
