Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508070045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A man pushed over the edge by Henry County's Cable 6 TV station forced an armed standoff with police Thursday.
And what did Cable 6 do?
The station broadcast the drama live.
No one was injured, and the man was arrested. But Investigator K.G. Nester of the Henry County Sheriff's Office, who was at the standoff, said: ``We were as close as you can come to having to use deadly force. He's very fortunate.''
Nester said he and Patrolman M.E. Rogers of the Martinsville Police Department chased the man and tackled him in the front yard of his home after he dropped a loaded 16-gauge shotgun. The hammer on the shotgun was cocked, and the man briefly had pointed it at officers, Nester said.
The man, whom Nester identified as Robert Fritz Weiss, 42, of Oak Grove Avenue in Martinsville, was fleeing back toward his house when he was tackled and arrested.
``If he had gotten in there, we might still be trying to get him out,'' Nester said. ``He was irate. There was no reasoning with him.''
The Martinsville Police Department charged Weiss with recklessly brandishing a firearm and being drunk in public. The Henry County Sheriff's Office charged him with making threatening phone calls, Nester said.
The phone calls are what started the situation, according to Nester and Charles Roark, the owner and producer at Cable 6 in Collinsville.
About 4 p.m. Thursday, a man called the station and threatened Bob Sharp, a Cable 6 reporter who had gone to the man's home and talked to him for a Cable 6 story last year. The caller said he was ``going to blow Sharp's brains out,'' according to Roark.
Twenty minutes later, the man called back and threatened another station employee.
Roark then picked up the phone and decided to broadcast his conversation with the man live.
Roark said that, although his life also was threatened by the man, he didn't think much about it.
``I'm a television producer. All I was thinking was, `Let's show this thing as it's happening.'''
Nester said the man became enraged Thursday about the story Cable 6 did about him last year. Roark said the story involved a domestic situation.
The man said comments made during a Cable 6 call-in show after the story ran had ruined his reputation, Roark said.
Nester said the man was walking around his neighborhood making the calls from a portable phone to Cable 6, a station known for its gossip-filled brand of local news.
The Henry County Sheriff's Office traced one of the calls. Investigators found the man they sought at a neighbor's home.
``The television was on. We could see and hear Cable 6,'' which still was broadcasting the incident, Nester said.
When approached by authorities, the man ran back into his home, then reappeared with the shotgun.
Nester said the man asked police several times to shoot him.
Knowing Cable 6's reputation for digging up local dirt, did Nester suspect before Thursday that somebody's anger might boil over into a public incident?
``Anybody's got the potential to go off,'' he said.
Nester said Weiss was in the Martinsville city jail Friday awaiting a bond hearing.
by CNB