A drug-crazed criminal threatened to “blow up the street” and shoot his fake hostage in the head during a 10-hour stand-off with armed police.
Callum Kerr, 32, Partington Square, Sandymoor, had been “off his box” on Class As and booze for five days, and Rachel Bates, 38, of The Uplands, Palacefields, when they barricaded themselves in at Bates’s bungalow in Runcorn on Thursday, August 18 last year. The armed siege ended with their arrests at 11pm that night, the stand-off having drawn so many resources from across Cheshire and North Wales that 145 police calls went unresponded.
John Oates, prosecuting at Chester Crown Court, sitting in magistrates’ court on Friday, told how two officers had arrived at the bungalow at 1.10pm to arrest Kerr and Bates over an alleged robbery in Widnes earlier that day, only to find the windows boarded up and Bates shouting and Kerr inside. Bates was shouting she would "cut herself", telling them “watch what happens when you come in” and shouted she would “stab herself” and she was “bleeding quite heavily”, and smashing glass and crockery could be heard.
