Roby Standoff Ends Peacefully Police Capture Woman After 5 Weeks When She Ventures Onto Porch

A woman who had held police at bay outside her home for more than five weeks was apprehended Thursday when she ventured onto her back porch to disable a video surveillance camera officers had placed there.

Illinois State Police officers captured Shirley Allen, 51, shortly before noon by shooting her with nonlethal rubber bullets. When Allen dropped to the porch, officers ran up to put plastic handcuffs on her and grab the shotgun she had left just inside the door.

Paramedics then drove Allen to a nearby Springfield hospital for a mental evaluation, which had been police officials’ goal throughout the 39-day standoff.

Allen’s apprehension ended the longest police standoff law officials can recall anywhere in the country. It began Sept. 22, when Christian County sheriff’s police arrived to serve court papers ordering Allen to undergo psychological testing.

Allen met them at the door with a shotgun, touching off an intense round-the-clock watch that attracted the attention of talk radio and anti-government groups around the nation.

State police devoted an estimated $750,000 in officers’ salaries and supplies to the stakeout, a figure agency Director Terry Gainer defended.

“I’ve got to tell you, I don’t think Mrs. Shirley Allen is worth a cent less,” Gainer said Thursday night.

After an intense five weeks in which Allen fired her shotgun at police several times and wounded a police dog, her capture was, by comparison, low-key. She walked onto her porch with a pair of scissors to snip the wires on a surveillance camera, and police positioned near the house hit her twice with the rubber bullets.

She lay on the ground passively while officers cuffed her, then sat on her porch talking with them and family members for almost an hour before being escorted “gently,” as Gainer put it, to the ambulance.

Allen was alternately lucid and delusional, he said. She complained about having her windows broken and talked to her stepdaughter about her family, then slipped into conversation about how helicopters in the sky had told her to stay in the house.

After she left, police got a long-awaited look inside the home. It was neat and tidy, Gainer said, with plenty of food in the pantry.

While some had questioned Gainer’s decision to keep up the stake-out so long, many were congratulating him for its peaceful conclusion Thursday.

“Their approach worked,” Gov. Jim Edgar said. “Nobody was killed and nobody was injured, and we’re just all glad it’s over.”

“I thought she was going to stay in there until she starved to death,” said resident Dave Jostes. “It was a new situation for the state police. Now it’s hard to second-guess how they did things.”

The case even attracted the attention of the paramilitary movement, and several members came to town to hold “Free Shirley” rallies and vigils against what they perceived as police persecution.

Allen will be evaluated at St. John’s Hospital. She will not face any criminal charges, Gainer said.