A man allegedly made sexually inappropriate gestures at a female Bloomington Fire Department captain and pulled a knife out while in a verbal altercation with another firefighter.
Bloomington police said the incident happened after 8 a.m. June 8 at the Bloomington Fire Department’s downtown station at 300 E. Fourth St.
The suspect, a 46-year-old Bloomington man, was taken to jail and held on $5,500 bond on a felony charge of intimidation with a deadly weapon and disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
The captain was inside the station working out on the stair climber when, according to a probable cause affidavit, the man made sexually explicit gestures with his hands and tongue.
One male firefighter conducting a truck check outside saw the man’s actions, the affidavit said, and asked him to “move along.” At that point, police said, the suspect began waving a sheathed knife at the firefighter. The affidavit said that after being asked to leave again, the man unsheathed the knife and “took a few more steps toward him with it.”
Another male firefighter, also on the truck check, told police the man threatened to “beat (their) ass.”
When tracked down, the suspect told police the woman behind the glass at the fire station was talking to him when a firefighter approached and asked what he was doing. He said the incident escalated after he got into a confrontation with the firefighter.
The police affidavit said when asked about the incident, the suspect told police he wouldn’t say “anything else about it and that he wasn’t going to admit to what he did.” When the officer asked about the firefighters’ accounts, he denied the allegations.
“(The suspect) stated he told me how it started,” the affidavit read, “but wasn’t going to tell me how it ended and that we would discuss it in court.”
He had changed clothes from when police interacted with him previously that day after a trespass complaint, according to the affidavit. At that point, before 8 a.m., he was wearing a teal flat-bill hat, yellow shoes and gray sweatpants and sleeved shirt, police said.
When BPD located him around 8:30 a.m., he was wearing a Pacer’s jersey and blue pants, with the same hat and yellow shoes.
Police found a fixed-blade knife in a tan sheath in his front-right waist area, the affidavit said. The officer asked how the firefighters could have known he had a knife, given that they located it under the jersey he was wearing.
“(His) response,” the affidavit read, “was that he didn’t know but that everyone knows he has a knife.”
Contact Andrew Miller at amiller@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bloomington police report man with knife threatened firefighters