Suspect in Gulfport homicide, kidnapping dead after standoff in Texas, police say
A Gulfport murder suspect considered armed and dangerous died early Friday after a SWAT team in Montgomery County, Texas, surrounded an apartment where he was hiding, a news release said.
The team had gotten word that Roderick Bowers was wanted in Gulfport in connection with an aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping and homicide. Members of the Gulf Coast Violent Offender Task Force were attempting to stop him in the county about 40 miles north of Houston late Thursday night when he ran off on foot into an apartment complex. Officers then set up a perimeter with K-9 units, a news release from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office says.
Officers later heard several gunshots from inside an apartment and sent in a remote robot equipped with a camera. The bodies of Bowers and a 52-year-old male resident were inside. The apartment resident has not been identified pending notification of next of kin, a news release from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office says.
Authorities do not believe Bowers knew the man he allegedly shot and killed in the Montgomery County apartment complex.
The sheriff’s homicide and violent crime unit is investigating.
Gulfport police put out a bulletin Nov. 10 saying that Bowers was wanted in connection with a shooting on 47th Avenue that left one man dead and another injured. He also was a suspect in a Nov. 6 kidnapping and aggravated assault.
ABC-TV 13 reported on Bowers’ capture and also that he had kidnapped the mother of his children in Gulfport four days before he allegedly shot and killed a man believed to have been dating the mother of Bower’s children.
“After that incident, Bowers fled Mississippi, but he called a local ABC station in Biloxi to tell them he was only trying to get his kids and when he saw the other man, he ‘lost it,’” the TV station said.
