
Heavy duty police equipment such as this armored vehicle juxtaposed with Christmas decorations created a surreal atmosphere during the Dec. 20-21 standoff on Lucy Street in Masury.
Looking out his window across Lucy Street on Christmas Eve, Ryan Kennedy felt sad.
The house at 545 Lucy still had its Christmas decorations up.
“Everything kind of looks the same, basically,” he said.
But, things were not the same. The owner of 545 Lucy, Jane Payton, had died in that house three days prior and Payton’s ex-boyfriend, Andrew Reedy, whom she had had evicted from her home, is accused of murdering her.
The event triggered a 21-hour standoff between Reedy and police until he surrendered at 7:20 a.m. Dec. 21.
“Surreal,” Kennedy said of the events that unfolded. “It was just happening. Weird.”
Kennedy was home with his 1-year-old daughter, Elsie, when his wife, Sarah, who had been out with their 4-year-old son, Fitz, called him and told him police were blocking the road.
“I looked out and they were just kind of walking around,” Ryan said. “It didn’t look very tense, I just go back to doing what I’m doing. I don’t really hear much else. And then, I look out the next time and there’s people with assault rifles and just chaos, police everywhere.”
Sarah decided not to go around the block to get home – one way to her home was still open initially – and went to her mom’s house elsewhere in Masury. She said it became “awful” that she couldn’t get home, because she felt like she couldn’t do anything.
“I was just a mess,” she said. “I’ve been a mess since. So stressful, the fact that they (her husband and daughter) were there and I didn’t know what was going on.”
Sarah kept glued to social media for any information that was being posted, not knowing if any of it was true.
Meanwhile, Ryan stayed in the basement with his daughter most of the time.
“I kept her tucked up against the wall in her jumper,” he said. “She got so much one-on-one attention that day because we were stuck.”
Any time Ryan had to go upstairs or he heard something, he would peek out a window. He said he didn’t feel in danger as much as he felt tense.
“Even just going to the window, there’s a bunch of armed, jumpy cops outside of my house,” Ryan said. “The flash-bang grenade, at that time, I’m like, OK, I don’t know what’s going on but that’s an explosion. That’s not a gunshot. I’m like, Are they breaking into the house now? Are there going to be more gunshots? Is there something more that I’m missing? After that, things settled down. It was kind of, like, boring.”
And then, it was over. Most of the police just left, and no one let them know it was OK to leave the house or come home, the Kennedys said.
You can hear gunfire “all the time” the Kennedys said, but they never know where it’s coming from, except when the neighbors shoot off guns on New Year’s Eve.
Sarah noted that she heard gunshots on Dec. 23.
“I was like, ‘What is wrong?’ It scared me,” she said. “My stomach tensed up and my heart dropped.”
The couple said they have always felt safe where they live, noting that members of Sarah’s mom’s family have lived in Brookfield and/or Masury for more than 100 years, and they don’t feel less safe now because the events of Dec. 20 and 21 were brought on by a domestic situation.
“As an American, it’s (violence) kind of a part of your life,” Ryan said.
But, it will take some time to get over the jumpiness, Sarah said.
Sarah said she had had one significant interaction with Reedy. “He actually came up and introduced himself to me a couple months ago because his dog got loose,” Sarah said, and he didn’t want to freak them out because he had come onto their property looking for the dog.
“We talked about the neighborhood and he said it was a nice neighborhood,” Sarah said. “He was the only neighbor that really introduced himself to me. We exchanged pleasantries and waved a few times, but we didn’t speak. She (Payton) seemed pretty quiet.”
“I wasn’t sure if that guy even had a job,” Sarah said. “I could see him every day in the summer. He would sit on his porch all day every day, drinking beer and listening to music really loud and just talking to everybody who walked past. We would see him all the time.”
Ryan said he had never seen any quarreling between Reedy or Payton, just a lone interaction that he said was tense.
“It’s just kind of crazy that it’s someone I’ve talked to,” Sarah said of Reedy. “I always felt like I had good instincts about people.”