Chase, standoff ends with apparent suicide

A crosstown police chase turned into a bizarre standoff early this morning, leaving the suspect dead — but not until he had tried to charge at the authorities with a street sweeper. According to KTRK, it all began around 12:30 a.m. at Briar Forest and the Beltway, where police saw the driver of a white Cadillac speeding. They ran the car's plates and found out that it might have been connected with several robberies, so they tried to pull the driver over, but he took off down I-10. The chase continued east along the Katy Freeway, then south on the West Loop, and south on Stella Link. The man finally crashed the car near the entrance of a salvage yard in the 100 block of Holmes Road.

After crashing, the man jumped out of his car, began firing at officers and managed to get inside the salvage yard. There, he was able to start a street-sweeping machine, which he unsuccessfully tried to crash through the salvage yard's fence — Channel 13 reports that he crashed that, too. He opened fire on officers again while running out of the salvage yard and into a nearby wooded area. Officers set up a perimeter around the area and finally moved in shortly after 5:30 a.m. to find the man dead: He had apparently used his weapon to commit suicide. The suspect hasn't been identified, and none of the police officers were injured during the incident.