Fortunately, no one was hurt:

A heavily armed SWAT team arrived on the scene, surrounded the building, closed off the streets, pulled their guns and aimed them at the doors of the building.

When the occupants exited, all students, they were ordered by gunpoint to the ground, face down.

But after postmaster Ron Steedley told officers that it was just members of a high school Spanish club shooting a movie, “Rolling Thunder”, officers backed off.

A bar patron had called police and reported a hostage situation after apparently seeing a group of students entering the building after hours, in costume, carrying black plastic guns. Steedley said they had asked to use the public building after it was closed as a movie set and Steedley agreed.

Neither Steedley or the school had advised the police that there would be a movie shoot. No one was arrested.

This, believe it or not, is the second time we know of in the last year that a SWAT team has mistakenly apprehended a film crew. The first time was even weirder:

Christopher Phelps, 20, a student at Adirondack Community who works as a cameraman at the TV station was portraying crime-fighter Banana Boy for a show being taped for the show “The Ravacon”. Phelps was wearing a bright yellow 9-foot homemade banana costume for a staged scene in a public parking lot which involved a man with a fake plastic knife who was pretending to stab Banana Boy.

A spectator at the scene told a passing police officer that one of the trio had a knife. The officer called for backup, 10 police cruisers arrived on the scene. The three men were ordered to the ground at gunpoint, handcuffed and placed in police cars for transport to the village police station where they were booked for disorderly conduct for causing a disturbance and failing to advise police of their filming plans.

After several court appearances and a great deal of controversy, they were granted a conditional discharge requiring them to listen to the police radio transmissions of the call and to write a 1,000 word essay.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 12:46 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.