A Stamford, Conn., man who died last week after an hours-long standoff with police shot up armored Bearcat vehicles, obliterated several police drones, and wore a military style shirt bearing a Nazi insignia, the state inspector general’s office said Tuesday.
The accounts were among details that emerged in the preliminary report by Inspector General Eliot Prescotton on the deadly Dec. 2 incident. Throughout much of the afternoon, police had exchanged gunfire with Jed Parkington until the 63-year-old took his own life. Parkington’s autopsy confirmed that he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
A second, decomposing body responders found while canvassing the house for explosives after the siege turned out to be a homicide victim who had died of “blunt impact injuries of head and torso with gagging,” the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner told police, according to the report. The remains had not been identified as of Tuesday. Neighbors told ABC News the couple occasionally rented rooms out.
The first person a Connecticut State Marshal encountered around 9 a.m. to serve a foreclosure eviction notice was Parkington’s wife, Carmen Parkington, in the driveway with her dog. They went to the back door, where Parkington confronted them.
“Take her someplace safe,” he said, pushing his wife back outside. “This is not going to end well.”
A utility belt around his waist appeared to be hung with explosive devices, and the marshal called in reinforcements. Stamford Police Department officers came and tried unsuccessfully to contact Parkington. They also called in Stamford’s hostage negotiation and special response teams.
Parkington spoke to the negotiator by phone while he remained barricaded on the second floor, but refused to leave the house.
“Yeah, I got no place to go,” he said, according to audio released with the report. His father, a WWII vet, had told him stories about “how to defend a house,” he said, adding of his father during the war, “They gave him a lot of cigarettes and stuff, and guess what? Lung cancer.”
He also decried the “money racket” of war, whose orchestrators are “using people as pawns.”
Parkington said he and his wife had been seeking housing for three years to no avail and that he had lived in this house since 2005.
“See, how can they throw people out if they don’t have any place to put them except a shelter?” Parkington asked. “Treating people like garbage.”
Connecticut Office of Inspector General
A screenshot
taken from a police drone video shows Jed Parkington’s barricaded upstairs window. (Connecticut Office of Inspector General)
At 12:34 p.m., special response team members arrived in two Bearcat armored vehicles and told Parkington via megaphone to come out with his hands up because he was under arrest. His reply was a barrage of gunfire. Footage from inside the vehicles caught the sound of bullets clanging against the trucks. Attempts to end the standoff with nonlethal flash bangs got the same response.
“Parkington again fired on police officers outside and, on several occasions, shot down drones … to ascertain Parkington’s location in the house,” the inspector general’s report said.
Officers fired back but didn’t hit him. At 3:30 p.m., they heard “a single shot” from inside the house and flew a drone inside.
“Parkington was observed with a single gunshot wound to the head and appeared to be deceased,” the report said. “The drone footage also revealed the presence of grenades, a pipe bomb and other improvised explosive devices.”
