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Huntsville, Alabama – A Black man, accused of shooting dead two innocent people in their own home, was the subject of a SWAT standoff that put a local neighborhood on lockdown for ten hours, reports say.

The suspect is being charged with three counts of capital murder for the incident, now blamed on a “mental health episode” by his surviving girlfriend.

According to reports, the Huntsville Police responded to a shots fired call at a home on Mt. Charron Road a little after midnight on Wednesday. Shortly after arriving, officers spotted the suspect, 33-year-old Maurice D’Antonio Chatman, fleeing from officers and entering inside his nearby residence.

When Police searched the home Chatman was observed originally fleeing from, they discovered the bodies of two men with apparent gunshot wounds. They would later be identified as White 74-year-old Ernest Bragg and 49-year-old Daniel Jones, whose causes of death were ruled a homicide.

The heavily armed Chatman-who is Black-then proceeded to barricade himself inside his home, forcing police to set up a security perimeter. HPD is said to have attempted to contact Chatman for hours through a negotiator, who eventually managed to get him a phone.

Reports indicate that when Chatman refused to turn himself in, a SWAT team was called to the scene. Authorities claimed the heavily armed officers had to force an entry into the home three different times since Chatman continued to move into different areas of the residence to hide. Eventually, SWAT officers breached the roof after Chatman fled into the attic, where he was ultimately arrested.

“Several attempts were made to get Chatman to surrender voluntarily. He was taken into custody utilizing several specialized HPD Units after he attempted to flee the scene,” HPD said in a release.

By the end of the ordeal, the operation to place Chatman into custody took a total of ten full hours, preventing some in the neighborhood from traveling to work. One individual, a construction worker commuting to a job on Mt. Charron Road, said he was thankful for the police response despite the delay.

“It’s good to see a nice presence of them making sure that the neighborhood is safe and making sure that the neighbors still feel safe where they could come out and not feel somehow their privacy has been invaded,” he said to WAAY31 ABC.

For the murders preceding the stand-off, Chatman is now facing three counts of capital murder, which, if convicted, could spell the death penalty. According to police, one of the charges stems from “the result of a modifier for the aggravated circumstance of a burglary.”

Chatman is currently in custody with the Madison County Sheriff’s Department and has been denied bail.

In the aftermath, neighbors who lived through the horrific event claimed that Chatman had a history of causing problems in the area, and had even called police on him for trespassing just hours before the murders.

They assert that if Huntsville Police had arrested Chatman earlier, the two victims would still be alive today. The reason for the killings, they believe, was due to an undescribed “mental illness” they experienced in previous dealings with him.

Chatman’s girlfriend appears to corroborate the claims. While she remained unidentified, the woman was said to have provided texts to local news that discussed ways to get the alleged Black double murderer “mental help.”

Like many towns in America’s deep south, Huntsville, Alabama is fully aware of the corrosive creep of racial replacement. According to the 2020 US Census Report, Huntsville’s White population remains a slim majority at 55.17%, down from 63.42% in the year 2000. Black residents now make up 29.00% of the overall population, and with it, a spate of violence which, according to Gitnux, is 98% higher than the national average.

In April, a 19-year-old was arrested by US Marshalls, after he fled to Pennsylvania to escape a killing in Huntsville just days prior. For the crime, police charged the suspect with capital murder. That killing would come after an earlier shooting in February which claimed the life of one man over what investigators stemmed from a “verbal altercation between two people who knew each other.”

In November, four Black suspects from Huntsville were arrested for the horrific kidnapping and death of a 15-year-old boy, whose remains were discovered in Sylacauga, Alabama.

In the United States, the echoing sting of unchecked Black violence against innocent people can be felt in every town, city, and rural neighborhood. In neighboring Mississippi, an elderly White couple in their 90s were mercilessly slain by a Black suspect found in possession of numerous hard drugs. The victims, 97-year-old Miles Herrington and 94-year-old Ina Herrington, were married for over 70 years before being found dead in their own home from violent circumstances.

In April, a Black man was arrested for stabbing a White man In the neck at a McDonald's restaurant while reportedly screaming that he “hated White people” prior to the attack. Despite the US Federal Government's insistence that so-called "White supremacy" is the greatest threat to the nation, the explicitly anti-White attack took place just blocks away from the White House.

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