5 dead, including 3 children, in Illinois town

  By NOMAAN MERCHANTEMINGTON, Ill. -- Five people, including a baby and two children, were found shot to death Friday at a home in a small eastern Illinois farming town, authorities said, and police said they were not searching for a gunman.

While not specifically saying the shooter was among the dead, Livingston County Sheriff Martin Meredith said the community was "safe from any harm" and authorities "are not looking for anyone in this crime."

County board member Bob Young, who lives in Emington, said the dead included a man, a woman, an infant, a first grader and a fourth grader. The family had moved to the town of about 100 people about 80 miles southwest of Chicago within the last six months and the two older children attend school in nearby Saunemin, Young said. The street where the family lived was closed by police, he said.

Meredith said first responders found the bodies after Livingston County dispatchers received a call Friday afternoon. Coroner Michael Burke will release the names of the victims once relatives are notified, the sheriff said.

Livingston County authorities and Illinois State Police crime scene technicians were still working the scene late Friday, Meredith said. He declined to release additional details about the shooting, saying more information would be released Saturday morning.

Residents described Emington as a once strictly farming town that has gone through changes in the last 20 years as young families moved in. Young said the town has become more of a bedroom community from which people commute north to cities such as Joliet, about 45 miles away.

"We did have an awful disaster here," said Emington Mayor Daniel Delaney, who's been in office for 24 years. "You never would have thought it would happen in our town of 100 people or less. It's very sad. There were helicopters flying over earlier. Right now it's just very, very, very sad for us here."

Delaney said the town is not prosperous and has received help from the state. "It's always really had a hard time. Most of the people are retired or farmers who moved into town," he said.

Young said Emington has a post office that's been targeted for closure and just a handful of small businesses - a grain elevator, a dog groomer and a small beauty salon. The town, he said, had never experienced anything like Friday's shootings.

"I've lived here all my life. I guess, 60, 70 years ago we had a bank robbery, was the other big thing, but otherwise, nothing like this," he said.

Young said he did not know the family well.

"We've seen the kids playing at the playground and talk to them," Young said. "We thought everything was fine."

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Associated Press writers David Mercer in Champaign and Karen Hawkins and Caryn Rousseau in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Michigan man kills 7, including his kids, then himself

  By TOM COYNE and JOHN FLESHERGRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Hours after the shooting stopped, a car chase ended and a gunman wanted for killing seven people took three hostages, Michigan authorities still hoped that the suspect might surrender without another death.

Police in Grand Rapids tried to talk an agitated Rodrick Shonte Dantzler into giving up late Thursday. They said his thoughts seemed to swing between surrender and asking officers to shoot him.

"He was talking about coming out, giving himself up," Police Chief Kevin Belk said. "He decided at the last moment to fire the gun."

The 34-year-old ex-convict from Grand Rapids killed himself with a single shot to the head, ending the standoff with his hostages unharmed. But authorities say Dantzler left behind a pair of bloody crime scenes - the result of an unexplained rampage in which he killed his daughter, an ex-girlfriend and five others, including a second child who police couldn't immediately identify.

"It makes no sense to try to rationalize it, what the motives were," Belk said. "You just cannot come up with a logical reason why someone takes seven peoples' lives."

The names of the dead were not immediately released. Autopsies were scheduled for Friday.

Records show that Dantzler was released from state prison in 2005, after serving time for assault less than murder. A spokesman for the prison system said Dantzler had not been under state supervision since then.

Police initially got a 911 call early Thursday afternoon from someone saying that a man had admitted to killing three people, Belk said. Police went to Dantzler's home, but he wasn't there and officers couldn't find him.

It wasn't long before authorities got a call from a woman who said her relatives had been shot. Next came a call about someone finding four gunshot victims at another house.

Officers soon found three bodies in a home on Plainfield Avenue.

An hour later, they discovered the other four across town in a ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac called Brynell Court.

Two of the dead were children.

Kyle Gietzen lives with his wife a few blocks from the home where three bodies were found. He was nearby and saw five to six officers trying to break in the front door, while several others went to the back door. He said he didn't know what had happened until later.

"I had no idea anybody had been shot," he said. "I just thought it was a drug sting or something. It's awful."

Another neighbor, Sandra Powney, lives across the street from one of the homes and said she had seen Dantzler at the ranch house, where a couple has lived for more than 20 years with two adult daughters. Powney said she had been at home all day and did not realize anyone had been killed until police arrived at the cul-de-sac in the midafternoon.

"For a while we couldn't come outside," she said. "They didn't know if there was someone still inside the house."

Lisa Schenden lives with her husband and their children two blocks from the home where four people were killed. She said the homeowners are a couple whose daughter has a daughter with the suspect. She didn't hear the shooting either, but she saw the suspect and his daughter drive up to the house earlier in the day.

"Just last night, my kids went over there swimming, and I went over with them," she said.

While police were investigating the seven homicides, Belk said police received a report of a "road rage" shooting.

Dantzler had apparently shot at a man through the rear window of the vehicle he was driving. Police spotted him, and began a chase that included Dantzler crashing into a patrol car in the city's downtown and exchanging gunfire with officers, during which a female bystander was shot in the shoulder.

Danztler drove a sport utility vehicle north from downtown and onto Interstate 96, crossing a grassy median and heading the wrong way down the highway while more than a dozen squad cars pursued him. Belk said he crashed the vehicle while driving down an embankment into a wooded area of the highway, which remained closed hours later.

"I look in my rearview mirror and see this big white SUV coming up behind me," said Carrie Colacchio, who lives a little more than a mile away from where Dantzler later took his three hostages. "The only way to get out of it was to push the gas pedal."

Colacchio said she couldn't turn off the road or slow down or go any other way, and she reached about 85 mph.

"I almost got smacked," she said. "I had to go up on the curb."

From the highway, Dantzler made his way toward a nearby single-family home, firing several shots as he forced his way inside and took hostages he did not know, police said. Dozens of officers with guns drawn cordoned off the neighborhood, near a small lake in the northern part of the city, as authorities shut down nearby Interstate 96.

That was around 7:30 p.m. During the next five hours, Dantzler fired sporadically at officers and inside the house. He vacillated between threatening to shoot the hostages and pleading with police to take him out, even asking negotiators whether there were snipers outside the home and where he should stand, Belk said.

"The suspect fired at our officers many times throughout the night," he said. "Even in the home, there was an exchange of gunfire. He fired as they made entry to the house."

Officers had gone inside to protect the hostages, and remained in the house throughout the negotiations with Dantzler. He changed course after several hours and asked how he could surrender. Belk said officers were talking with him about how to turn himself in when they heard the gunshot.

"Obviously, we're extremely disappointed at the outcome," Belk said. "We would much rather have had the suspect surrender and have him in custody."

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Associated Press writers Kathy Barks Hoffman in Grand Rapids, and Corey Williams and David N. Goodman in Detroit contributed to this report.

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2 killed, including officer, in Memphis hotel

  Eyewitness NewsMEMPHIS -- Authorities were investigating Monday after a Memphis police officer and another person were shot to death at a hotel in the middle of the city's entertainment district filled with people celebrating the Fourth of July.

In a news release, police said a suspect was in custody and he was hospitalized due to non-critical injuries sustained during his arrest.

Police Director Toney Armstrong says Officer Timothy Warren, a patrol officer with the department since 2003, died at Regional Medical Center after the shooting.

Warren was among several officers responding to a call at the Doubletree Hotel around 7 p.m. Sunday. A civilian victim, who had not yet been positively identified, was also shot and pronounced dead at the scene in what officials said started as a domestic dispute.

Armstrong has been director of Memphis police department for just a couple months.

"Even if you had been the director 20 years, this is the one phone call that you hope you never have to get," he said.

WMC-TV reported that police had responded earlier in the night to a disturbance call involving the same suspect, but let him go.

When they were called back, the officer who was shot took the stairs while other officers took the elevator.

Police cars and heavily armed officers swarmed the hotel and surrounding area. The hotel sits at a busy intersection adjacent to the historic Peabody hotel and the Memphis Redbirds minor-league stadium, where a game was in progress.

Joel Miller of Maryland was attending a family reunion at the hotel. He told The Commercial Appeal that he got in an elevator with the suspect, who was wearing shorts and a plaid shirt.

He "seemed off," Miller told the newspaper, "like he was out of it."

Miller said as the man got off on the third floor, he pulled a gun from his pocket. "He looked at us and pointed his finger and did like this," Miller said, pretending to fire a weapon.

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