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NORTH SALT LAKE — A man was arrested early Monday morning after a six-hour standoff with SWAT teams while his wife and children were in the home, according to North Salt Lake police.
Officers were dispatched to the home near 400 N. Stamford Ave. around 8 p.m. Sunday in connection with a domestic violence situation, North Salt Lake Police Sgt. Terry Fritz said. However, officers discovered that it wasn’t a “normal domestic” incident, and a woman and several children were barricaded in a room because they didn’t feel like they could safely leave the home, Fritz said.
The husband, later identified as 31-year-old Joshua Briscoe, had some firearms and body armor in the home, causing “great concern” for officers so SWAT teams from Davis County and Salt Lake City were called on to the scene, Fritz said.
A hostage negotiation team from Bountiful was also dispatched to the scene, and after a 6-hour standoff, the children and wife were safely evacuated from the home around 2 a.m., Fritz said. The two children were both under 10 years old.
Briscoe was taken into custody and booked into the Davis County Jail in connection with domestic violence in the presence of a child, aggravated assault, three counts of kidnapping and criminal mischief.
“Obviously when you have a person with a firearm, you want to make sure everybody is safe,” Fritz said. “In this case, we wanted to take our time and make sure we didn’t escalate the situation, so we wanted to make sure we were stable so when the SWAT team and the wife and the children were safe, we were able to take the appropriate action to take the suspect into custody.”
Fritz said some other people were also evacuated from the area during the standoff, but he didn’t specify how many. UTA provided a bus for those displaced to get out of the cold.
Contributing: Caitlin Burchill
