UPDATE: Suspect identified, more details throughout . . .
Westminster Police braced for a long standoff with a man who barricaded himself inside a Bolsa Avenue music store, but it all ended peacefully in less than hour with an arrest and subsequent mental health evaluation. It all began this morning when an angry man walked into Van Son Productions and started yelling at employees for some unknown reason.
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A clerk inside the store at 9282 Bolsa Ave., Westminster, feared for the safety of employees and called 9-1-1. She reported the man had brandished a knife, but that turned out to be unfounded.
Employees managed to file out of the store, leaving the man alone inside. Westminster Police officers arrived to discover he had locked himself inside Van Son Productions. He refused all demands to come outside.
The store's owner later arrived to unlock the door, at which point the man surrendered without incident. Cuong Truong, a 35-year-old transient, was not booked, but he was taken to a mental health evaluation center.
No one was injured and no one knows what set the fellow off.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.