They were asleep in their Kennewick home. Then the banging started

Regan Carney had rarely interacted with the man who came pounding on her door in the early morning hours Saturday.

The wife and mother of three said she doesn’t understand why Jose Antonio Contreras was shouting and acting irrationally. Why he was yanking a light fixture out of the wall outside the Kennewick apartment and setting the door on fire.

“He obviously feels like we did something to him,” Carney said. “I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before.”

She called the police, who extinguished the fire and ultimately arrested Contreras after a standoff in his nearby apartment.

Officers tried using tear gas and a Taser to subdue Contreras. After several hours, the department’s police dog, Axel, was sent in. He allegedly kicked the dog injuring it before officers went in to pull him out.

Contreras, 33, was taken to Trios Southridge Hospital to get minor injuries treated before he was brought to Benton County jail on suspicion of first-degree arson and an outstanding warrant.

Carney and her family moved into the Woodland Green apartment complex on Conway Place three years ago. Contreras lived in the second floor apartment across from the family for two months and, Carney said, they didn’t talk to him.

The family was asleep when the pounding started just after 3 a.m. Awakened by the noise, Carney and her husband went to the peephole and saw Contreras yanking the light fixture off of the wall beside their door.

“He was yelling, but it was hard to tell what he was saying,” she said.

The suspect’s erratic behavior did not stop when her husband yelled at Contreras to go home. When she picked up the phone to call police, he began throwing tools and other items at the door.

When police arrived, he was setting the victim’s front door on fire, Kennewick police said.

Inside of the apartment, Carney and her husband didn’t know what was going on outside. She said Contreras disappeared from view, and it started to look a little hazy, but they believed it was because of the quality of the peephole.

As officers confronted Contreras, he retreated into his home and grabbed a knife, Kennewick police said.

Officers doused the fire and gave the Carney family the choice to flee the apartment or to hide in the bedroom. They chose to stay in their apartment, but as the Tri-City Regional SWAT Team arrived and police flooded the complex, officers made the call to evacuate the building.

To get the family out without putting them in easy reach of Contreras, police had them climb out of a bedroom window and onto the top of the SWAT vehicle before they were lowered to the ground.

“There was so many cop cars in the parking lot that we couldn’t leave. We sat in a cop car until they called us a cab,” Carney said.

Carney and her family waited at her sister’s home until 11:30 a.m. before being told it was safe to return home. Contreras surrendered a few hours earlier, and police were finishing with the scene.

Carney remains afraid that Contreras, a known gang member, might retaliate. But, she said, she likes the community that sits near Westgate Elementary and across the street from the Keewaydin Discovery Center.

“There are a lot of families here. There is a sense of a family community,” she said. “And from time to time something bad happens, but every apartment complex I’ve lived in there have been things like that that have happened.”

This story was originally published October 15, 2017 at 3:55 PM with the headline "They were asleep in their Kennewick home. Then the banging started."