Law enforcement officers responded to a call about an armed man barricaded into a home in Murrayville around 10 a.m. on Friday morning, leading to a standoff that lasted over 5 hours.
Devon Brannon, 36, had forced his way into the home of two men and a woman that he knew on Underwood Drive and started waving around a handgun.
By around 11 a.m., the SWAT team arrived at the scene to help local law enforcement resolve the standoff as peacefully as possible.
Nearby residents, around Barker’s Bend Drive and Underwood Drive, were asked to evacuate their homes for their own safety. Some refused to evacuate.
One local resident said he didn’t believe it when he first heard.
“My neighbor called me and told me that he was just asked to evacuate the area. I really thought he was playing a joke on me. I almost hung up on him, but then they knocked on my door.”
At about 4 p.m., a fire broke out on the second floor of the house that the man had barricaded himself into. The cause of the fire is currently unknown.
The fire department quickly took care of the blaze and made sure everyone was safe.
Shortly after the fire, the suspect stepped out of the house and turned himself in to the police officers on site.
The standoff was resolved peacefully, with no shots fired and no one injured.
A college student who lives down the road said that she spent the afternoon counting the number of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars that sped by with their sirens on.
“I was actually in the middle of taking a test, but I can see the road from where I was sitting in my living room. At first, it was just one ambulance and one police car, but eventually another would pass by every few minutes. Once the fire trucks started coming, it was almost non-stop.”
Just between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., she said she counted 5 fire engines, 3 ambulances, and 5 police cars.
Murrayville residents were stunned that something as intense as a SWAT standoff could happen in a rural area like theirs.
One local woman said she was not prepared at all for something like this to happen.
“It’s a back road neighborhood in a very rural area, so no one expects something like [the standoff] to happen here. It was not something we were prepared to experience.”
A local man said that this is not something he is used to seeing in his neighborhood. “It’s a very unique situation,” he said, “There are more cop cars than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time.”
Brannon was booked into Hall County Jail and charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a firearm and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to Hall County’s online records.
