Assault suspect arrested after chilly standoff

Okanogan County sheriff’s deputies and Omak police took an assault suspect into custody Wednesday morning after spending a cold night locked in a standoff, the sheriff said.

The Sheriff’s Department had received a tip late Tuesday that a woman had been killed at a rural methamphetamine party just south of Okanogan, Sheriff Frank Rogers said Wednesday. Deputies arrived at about midnight to find the woman, Angel Brown, alive but roughed up and lying in a mobile home. Her alleged assailant, Donald R. Nissen, 42, who was armed, had locked himself in an outbuilding, Rogers said.

“He said (an obscenity) and fired a couple of rounds,” said Rogers, who added that the suspect fired about 12 rounds during the eight-hour siege.

“It was hard to tell where he was shooting,” Rogers said. “Some may have gone over the heads of deputies.”

After all-night talks with the suspect with temperatures in the single digits, deputies fired tear gas into the building at about 6 a.m., Rogers said, but Nissen still did not surrender. As many as 18 Okanogan County law enforcement personnel, including two Omak police officers, were on the scene and took turns warming up in an ambulance throughout the night.

At 8:45 a.m., a situation response team was sent into the building and arrested Nissen without a fight, Rogers said.

The suspect is being held in the Okanogan County Jail on charges of assault, reckless endangerment and intimidating a public servant. He was the only one arrested or charged in the incident. The sheriff said Brown was treated for “bumps and bruises” and released at Mid-Valley Hospital in Omak.

Rogers said there are “nonextraditable” warrants out for Nissen’s arrest for probation violations in Montana and Wyoming.

“We are going to send them a teletype asking them if they are sure they don’t want him,” the sheriff said.

He said a phone call that shots had been fired and that a woman may have been killed came in at about 11:30 a.m. from “a guy who was down there partying with them. They hadn’t been to bed in four or five days.”

The sheriff said methamphetamine is a real problem in rural Okanogan County.

“We got so many people using it’s ridiculous,” Rogers said.