On Sunday morning, the day after a police SWAT team converged on the Folsom Street flat he shares with a sister and two nieces, Ronald Saenz was still cleaning up.
He had already mopped the oil off the kitchen floor (a police tactic, he guessed, to make the suspect inside slip if he tried to escape) and boarded up the hole police made in the ceiling to check out the crawl space above (the suspect wasn’t there). He had yet to right the baby furniture that had been tipped over in a front storage room.
“It was a mess,” Saenz said of the flat at 2907 Folsom Street that became the site of a four-hour standoff on Saturday afternoon. Police suspected that Roger Allen, who had allegedly assaulted his sister and “brandished” a weapon, was hiding inside with the weapon.
Witnesses told police they had seen Allen go into the Saenz flat. He had, but by the time police searched the flat two to three hours later, he had left.
“I told them [police] he wasn’t here,” Saenz,34, said Sunday. That turned out to be accurate, but a SWAT team nevertheless stormed the flat at around 2:30 p.m.
Sgt. Mike Andraychak said police believed the suspect was inside. He added that he had never heard of oil on the floor as a police tactic, and said that Saenz could call the police department’s legal division to make a claim for any damages.
Police ended up arresting Allen at around 4 p.m. on Saturday in a backyard in the 1300 block of Treat Avenue, which runs through Bernal Dwellings.
(Update Monday, August 8: Police said the suspect, who was not inside the apartment, was arrested in Lucky Alley that runs between Treat and Folsom. It was just a few houses down from the Folsom residence. Earlier, police had said he was arrested in the 1300 block of Treat, which is two blocks away.
The police source also said he believed the suspect had more recently left the residence. Saenz, the tenant, told Mission Loc@l that the suspect had entered at around noon and left shortly after. He was not there when the tactical team searched the place at around 3 p.m., but he was arrested at 4 p.m.)
Saenz said Allen lives at Bernal, and it was there that his 30-year-old friend got into an argument with his mother on Friday night. It’s unclear if police were called then, but another family argument erupted Saturday morning at the Bernal residence — this time between Allen and his sister, according to Saenz.
Saenz first heard about the disputes Saturday at noon, when Allen rapped on his door, clearly distraught. “He said he’d had these arguments and that his sister called the police on him,” Saenz recalled.
Once inside the apartment, Allen told Saenz that his sister was telling police that he had a weapon. Saenz said his friend had no weapon when he came to the door, but Allen was nervous about the police being called because he had recently missed a meeting with his parole officer.
You can’t stay here, Saenz told his friend. His two nieces –- one 13 years old and the other three — were asleep. Saenz didn’t want any trouble for them or his sister.
Within several minutes, Saenz said, Allen, still upset, left through the back door. Soon after — by 12:30 p.m. or so — police had filled Folsom Street in front of the Saenz apartment, looking for Allen. Witnesses told police, correctly, that they had seen the suspect go into the Saenz flat.
“We went to the back and stood on the balcony and there were police there, too,” said Saenz.
Police asked them to evacuate. They did. Next door at 2909 Folsom, Saenz’s grandmother, aunt, and a cousin and his wife also left their apartment.
“They frisked us; I told [them] he wasn’t there,” Saenz said. The suspect had been there earlier, Saenz explained to police, but had left.
No matter. After more than an hour of waiting and being unable to make contact with the suspect, the SWAT team decided to check for themselves. After they confirmed that Allen was not in the flat, the SWAT team left, while some police remained behind.
At around 4 p.m., Saenz was on his way back to his apartment when all of a sudden police started running out of the apartment and south on Folsom. “Stay here,” they warned him.
The officers were on their way to arrest Allen.
Saenz said he hopes they can get some help from police to fix the hole in the ceiling and to take care of paint that had been tipped over and got on some clothes.
We didn’t need this, he said, adding that a new landlord is pressuring them to leave. “This won’t help.”
