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Periwinkle Dr. residents describe a harrowing night that began with 'pow-pow-pow'

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Timothy Bryant points to a patch of lawn on the other side of Periwinkle Drive where the suspect's car had been and where several officers with assault weapons gathered after the shooting around 1:50 a.m. Saturday. (The Rochester Voice photo)

ROCHESTER - Timothy Bryant said he woke up from a sound sleep early Saturday morning, but he didn't know why.

"Then I heard it," he said. "Three gunshots - pow pow pow - and I opened my eyes and saw lights flashing outside my window."

Moments later he said he walked to the other end of his Periwinkle Drive mobile home and looked out to see six or seven police officers with assault rifles standing near a car parked on a patch of grass.

It was the start of a long night with little sleep for Bryant, whose neighborhood was crawling with cops for the next seven hours as they tried to track down a suspect who fired at an officer trying to pull him over around 1:50 a.m. on Milton Road.

According to police, the suspect refused to stop, pulled onto Periwinkle Drive, jumped out of his car and fled into the woods toward the Salmon Falls River.

The officer gave chase and was fired at a number of times, police say.

The incident drew a wide response from Rochester Police as well as Maine and New Hampshire SWAT teams, who systematically established a slowly closing perimeter in an effort to take the man into custody.

With the help of two helicopters hovering over the scene, lawmen were able to close in on the suspect enough to use flash bangs a little before 9 a.m. Flash bangs are often used by special tactical units during hostage rescue and high-risk warrants. They are an ATF controlled Class-C explosive device that emits a bright light and thunderous noise to distract potentially dangerous individuals.

Right around 9 a.m. Bryant said he and his wife heard a single gunshot. Police later said the suspect, who has been neither identified nor charged, is being treated at Portsmouth Regional Hospital for a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

During the dragnet several Maine State Troopers were positioned on a portion of River Road in Lebanon, Maine, that is directly across the Salmon Falls River from Periwinkle Drive in Rochester.

The suspect was taken into custody on the Maine side of the river, but it's not clear if he was taken into custody in Maine as in some parts of this stretch of the river in question, the border between the two states is a short distance into what would be considered Lebanon.

Another Saks MHP resident, Sherry Lowell, said she never heard the shooting, but was awoken by the helicopters circling directly overhead around 5:30 a.m. The recently arrived park resident said many of her neighboring mobile homes are vacant.

"I locked my doors right away," she said. "I was worried he might go in one of the empty ones. This is not what I expected when I moved in a few months ago."

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