AUGUSTA (AP) – A man entered a Wal-Mart Supercenter armed with two handguns Friday night and told everyone to get out, sending crowds of screaming customers outside before a brief standoff with police in which he eventually surrendered.
The man, identified as Philip Urguhart, 42, of Windham, did not fire any shots and no one was hurt, said Steve McCausland, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.
“Everbody was just screaming and chaos,” Dulcey Morse of Farmingdale told WGME-TV in Portland.
“My daughter and I were sitting outside the salon waiting for her turn to get her hair cut,” Theresa Smith of Farmingdale told The Associated Press. “We heard this man yelling, ‘there’s a guy with a gun, get out!”‘
“We just started running for the door. I was kind of in shock. My daughter grabbed ahold of me.”
Smith said about 50 people were running out the doors with them, about 8:45 p.m.
“This is such a tragic week for our country, and to have this happen at home in Maine is just terrifying,” she said.
Urguhart was taken to MaineGeneral Hospital for a psychological evaluation and was later expected to be charged with terrorizing and creating a police standoff, McCausland said.
Police had gotten a report that Urguhart had dropped his teenage daughter off the side of Interstate 95 between Palmyra and Augusta; they were able to contact him on his cell phone and learned from him that he was headed to the Wal-Mart near Augusta’s civic center.
A police negotiator made contact with Urguhart in the store and eventually persuaded him to surrender. Police also watched him on surveillance cameras in the store. He was taken into custody in the electronics department; no hostages were taken, WGME reported.
State police, Augusta Police and the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Department were called to the scene.
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