D.C. Tractor Tussle Ends Peacefully
A two-day standoff in the nation's capital between police and a man in a tractor is over. The man gave up Wednesday morning and is now in police custody.
North Carolina tobacco farmer Dwight Watson held police at bay since Monday afternoon, when he drove a large tractor into a shallow pond near the Washington Monument.
Police said Watson claimed to have explosives, but a preliminary search of the tractor and the surrounding area after his surrender turned up no explosives and no weapons.
U.S. Park Police Chief Theresa Chambers said Watson had a permit to demonstrate near the Washington Monument from March 16-22, but the permit did not include the area where he drove his tractor into the pond.
Chambers said Watson surrendered to a SWAT team comprised of FBI agents and park police. She said Watson negotiated the terms of his surrender with the team, but she did not disclose the conditions.
Watson kept law enforcement at bay while complaining that government policies were forcing him out of his family's tobacco-farming business. Streets remained closed for blocks during the standoff, snarling traffic for miles and forcing alteration of several bus routes.
A police helicopter kept watch from above and police tactical teams maneuvered in the area around the tractor. Watson had promised police negotiators that he would surrender, and authorities pressed him earlier Wednesday to make good on that pledge.
Amy Morris of CBS Radio affiliate WTOP-AM reports that police used psychological tactics against Watson.
At 4:45 a.m., police turned off all floodlights in the area. A series of six blasts could be heard and an acrid smell followed.
The explosions, known in police circles as flash-bangs, create a bright light and a loud bang.
Otherwise, floodlights were kept on Watson all night.
As daylight broke on the third day of the drama, there were some signs of police impatience.
"Come on Dwight," a female police negotiator could be heard pleading over a megaphone. "You said you were coming out. You gave me your word. Come out now."
Washington residents – already jittery about the prospect of war, the possibility of retaliatory attacks and memories of jammed streets from the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon in Virginia – wondered throughout the standoff how one farmer could create so much chaos for commuters.
"What this shows is, one or two people can really throw a metropolitan area into chaos," said Richard Clarke, who recently retired as one of the longest-serving, senior counterterrorism officials in the White House. "I assume that the sniper incident, the anthrax incidents and perhaps the tractor incident are not lost on people who might want to make further mischief in the future."
Phil Anderson, senior fellow for the International Security Program at Center for Strategic and International Studies, vouched for the way law enforcement was handling the standoff.
"It's disruptive and there is no easy solution, but there is no better way to protect the public than to establish a safe zone and to assume an explosive device is there," he said. "They want to resolve the issue peacefully, but the key question is how long do you let this go on?"
It's not the first incident of its kind in the capital.
In December 1982, Norman D. Mayer, a 66-year-old nuclear arms protester from Miami Beach, threatened to blow up the Washington Monument. Police evacuated nearby buildings and closed all streets in a several-block area around the National Mall during a 10-hour siege.
Mayer abruptly started driving away from the monument and threatened to become "a moving time bomb in downtown Washington." He was killed by a barrage of police gunfire. The truck was later determined not to contain explosives.