About 11 hours after an armed murder suspect holed up inside a home on Blake Street, a small explosion could be heard as SWAT team members fired tear gas into the home about 7:15 p.m.. That was followed by several rounds of gunfire, then silence.
Gary Goodman, 53, a truck driver and Vietnam vet, is suspected of gunning down his estranged wife, 44-year-old Paula Goodman, about 8 a.m. Thursday as she was returning home with a male friend in the 6400 block of Venango Drive, not far from the home on Blake where Goodman had barricaded himself inside.
Louisville Metro Police spokesman Dwight Mitchell says "our preliminary investigation reveals that the man and woman got into some type of altercation, shots were fired. The female received fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene."
LMPD Standoff With Barricaded Murder Suspect ...Click Here To See Video
Power to the house Thursday afternoon after hearing what sounded like drilling and hammering coming from inside because they didn't want to give him a chance to build a reinforced barricade inside the home.
Police say they decided to act sooner rather than later because Goodman has not hesitated to fire at officers. Mitchell says "when officers arrived, they were fired upon from inside the house. Officers did return fire."
Police asked residents in the area to stay in their homes until the situation was resolved, and have access to nearby streets.
Michelle Price, who lives just a few doors down from Goodman, says "I heard he served in the military, he had a military store."
Police fear Goodman may have had an arsenal of weapons inside the home -- including armor-piercing bullets -- another reason they decided to storm the home.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary, which is only a couple of blocks away on Jessamine Lane, went into lockdown for a short time after learning about the standoff situation.
Students were confined to their homerooms and gym for the first part of the day and only told there was a police situation.
One student told us that when he walked in the building, "everybody was telling me to go straight to the gym. They had all the doors locked, we were hearing announcements ... the teachers were told to escort the kids to their rooms and lock their doors."
Although teachers would only tell students there was an incident, the student we spoke with feared the worst. "I was thinking something bad happened."
School officials dismissed students on time at 3:45. Many parents were waiting and relieved to find their children unharmed. "That's enough excitement for the rest of the year as far as I'm concerned," said one parent.
Mitchell says police have been in contact with school officials to discuss the possibility of rerouting school buses if the situation hasn't been resolved by the time the school day ends.
JCPS spokeswoman Lauren Roberts tells us that the school will make arrangements with parents to pick up students who walk to and from school.
Meanwhile, police continued trying to make contact with the suspect with no success, but they are in no hurry to escalate the situation, emphasizing that the safety of the community comes first.