Man in jail after shots fired at house

A Spokane man remains in jail on $100,000 bond following a weekend standoff with police.

Ernest Earl Strebeck, 46, who is believed to have fired several rounds at an elderly woman’s front door, was arrested after a sheriff’s corporal shot him with beanbags in front of another would-be victim’s home early Saturday.

Strebeck was armed with a handgun when members of the sheriff’s SWAT team confronted him as he sat on the porch of another home at 6536 N. Freya St.

Strebeck refused commands to lower the gun, and instead stood up and stepped down from the porch. He then tossed the handgun onto the porch and walked away with his hands in his pockets. Cpl. Jeff Shover used a shotgun to fire three beanbags at Strebeck – enough to subdue him and put him in handcuffs. He was taken to a hospital and later jailed.

Sheriff’s officials were searching for Strebeck after Kelly Hull, who lives in the 4000 block of East Francis Avenue, called 911 at about 4:15 a.m. and said a stranger was trying to bash in the door to her grandmother’s nearby home with a large flower pot. He pulled out a gun and fired at the door. He then turned and began walking toward Hull as she stood with her son.

“It was like the worst experience ever when he started walking toward us,” Hull said. “I thought he was going to kill us because we’d yelled at him.”

But the man, identified by police as Strebeck, continued walking. A neighbor who awoke to the gunfire confronted him, but Strebeck pointed the gun at him, police said. That man also called 911.

Strebeck walked to the North Freya home, where he started rattling the door handle and told a 43-year-old woman who lived there to open the door. The woman hid under a large metal desk in the back of her home and called 911.

Before Strebeck was struck with the beanbag rounds from the shotgun, he told a deputy, “I’ll drop the gun when you shoot me,” according to court documents.

Hull said she had just arrived home from her job as a bartender when she heard the commotion. She said her grandmother, who is in her 80s, woke up but assumed the noise was from fireworks. Hull said her grandmother is “doing OK.”

“She’s a rock,” Hull said.

Strebeck appeared in Spokane County Superior Court on Monday on assault and attempted burglary charges.