CHESAPEAKE -- "Building Inspector" might not be the first title that comes to mind when you think about dangerous job positions within a city government. Wednesday morning, though, an inspector had a shave with danger in Plymouth Park when, police say, someone inside a home on Scotia Drive started shooting.
"They had everything all blocked off and lights flaring," Andrea Graves tells 13News. "It wasn't one of those things I wanted to stand out here and gawk and look. I didn't care what was going on. I just wanted to be in my house where it was safe and sound and tell everybody, 'Don't come here.'"
Graves saw the building inspector a couple hours before that, touching his arm that was bloodied, talking to paramedics. At that point, It just seemed he had gotten hurt somehow with no indication he had been hit while sitting in his truck. Chesapeake officers aren't sure if what struck the city worker was a bullet or pellet, only that it came from some kind of gun.
"When I left this morning, I left by myself, a empty house, and come home to this," Darlene Spellman says.
Spellman lives inside the home in which detectives believe the shooter was. Whatever fired from the gun, it put a hole in her front window, leaving a corner of the glass cracked.
"You come home, and you leave your house one way, and to come and it's another way, you would be upset, too, and I don't have a clue as to what went on."
The shooting caused police to treat what happened as a barricade situation and bring in negotiators while tactical team members surrounded the house. The SWAT unit eventually made its way inside the home, but found no one there.
Chesapeake police spoke to Spellman as well as one of her 16-year-old twins. Detectives said they would get back to her. 13News asked if she thought her children might have had something to do with the shooting that shutdown the neighborhood for hours. Spellman replied, "At this point, I really don't know, and I'm trying to get answers."
The building inspector was not hurt seriously. He received treatment in the neighborhood.
