SAN ANTONIO, Texas – A shooting and standoff in Stone Oak Wednesday night that left seven San Antonio police officers wounded and a suspect dead also kept neighbors on edge for hours.
“It was crazy!,” said Heidy Zapata, who lives at the Sonterra Heights apartments, located on Stone Oak Parkway near Loop 1604.
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Zapata said she had just stepped into the shower in her ground-floor apartment when she heard what sounded like a car backfiring a little before 8:30 p.m.
“I hoped that’s what it was or the tire popped,” Zapata said. “But then we heard two more afterwards and that’s when we realized, ‘Ok, these are gunshots.’”
>> LATEST: 7 SAPD officers injured in Stone Oak shooting, suspect killed
Here’s a timeline of how the incident unfolded:
At around 8:30 a.m., an officer answering a call about a suicide in progress was shot in the leg by a man who then ran back into an apartment, according to San Antonio police.
Within minutes, many more officers were seen rushing toward the apartment complex.
By 9:15 p.m., SAPD Chief William McManus had posted a message on X, saying three officers had been shot.
Three ofcs shot responding to suicide in progress in Stone Oak. Just arriving on-scene. Scene still hot!!
— Chief Bill McManus (@Chief_McManus)
A preliminary report says several teams of officers were approaching the apartment when the man, identified as Brandon Scott Poulos, 46, began firing from inside.
A total of seven officers were wounded, the report said.
Four of them were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment, according to the San Antonio Fire Department. Others were treated at the scene.
McManus described all of the wounds as being “non-life-threatening.”
Poulos, meanwhile, remained inside the apartment.
>> What we know about Brandon Poulos, the man accused of shooting 7 SAPD officers in Stone Oak
Officers could be heard on their radios around 9:25 p.m., announcing that they had the apartment complex surrounded.
A public information officer later sent out an appeal, around 10:30 p.m., asking people who live in the area to keep away from the trouble zone.
Zapata, who lives just across from his balcony, stayed out of the firing line.
“We just, kind of, stayed away from the windows and walls. We just stayed in our bathroom. Occasionally, we switched over to the kitchen,” she said.
The tense situation, by all accounts, dragged on for hours.
Although news crews on the scene were promised an update from McManus, he did not hold a news conference.
Instead, he posted a video directly to SAPD’s social media accounts, giving details of what happened.
It wasn’t until after 2 a.m. Thursday that official word came of Poulos’ death.
McManus said he was found in the apartment, dead from a gunshot wound.
However, he said it was unclear whether the gunshot was self-inflicted, or perhaps, from SWAT officers firing at him.
Thursday morning, investigators still had the area cordoned off with crime scene tape.
The broken windows on a ground-floor apartment made it clear exactly where the shooting happened.
Zapata still is having trouble believing it happened at all, especially in a neighborhood that she had always felt was insulated from this sort of trouble.
“That’s exactly what my thought was,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Why? We’re in Stone Oak!’”
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