Police were trying to talk a man in this second-floor apartment into surrendering Friday, Dec. 21. (The Enterprise/Kristine de Leon)
UPDATE: After a standoff lasting nearly five hours, Xavier R. Machuca surrendered to police just after 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 21, according to the Oregon State Police.
ONTARIO — A 27-year-old man wanted for attempted murder was holding police at bay from within an Ontario apartment Friday night, triggering the evacuation of his complex and the temporary lockdown of a nearby elementary school.
The man, identified as Xavier R. Machuca, 27, of Ontario, has been taunting police from a second-floor apartment of the Fairview Apartments on Northwest Ninth Street.
“I’m not coming down without a fight,” he yelled to police at one point Friday afternoon.
He had been holding out in the apartment with a woman he knew but eventually allowed her to leave, witnesses reported.
Police were trying to arrest Machuca on charges of attempted murder, first-degree assault, and unlawful use of a weapon. According to an affidavit filed in Malheur County Circuit Court, three men left a unit at the Fairview Apartments sometime early Friday and stopped along a road in north Ontario. One of the men, identified in court records as Jose Cuna, was shot in the face. He was later taken to Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Ontario for treatment and his condition couldn’t be immediately established.
When police moved to arrest him, authorities put May Roberts Elementary School in lock down just as students were being dismissed for the day. Teachers and other school employees herded children back into the school, where they were kept for about a half hour. The school is near the apartment complex where police were staged.
Available court records show that Machuca pleaded guilty in 2008 in Malheur County to one count of unlawful use of a weapon and four counts of reckless endangerment and sentence to five years.
The Malheur Enterprise will update as more information becomes available. If you have information or photographs to share, please dispatch them to [email protected]
Reporter Pat Caldwell of the Enterprise contributed to this report.
CORRECTION: The suspect’s name is Xavier R. Machuca, not Xaiver R. Machuda.