K9 officer locates man after Kalamazoo off-duty detective sees domestic dispute during marathon

Around 9 a.m. on Sunday, an off-duty detective with Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety (KDPS) was running a marathon when she noticed a man and woman having a dispute.

The pair were in a parked car along the side of the 2000 block of Winchell Ave. when the detective said she saw the man pull out a gun from his waistband. When the woman in the car saw the gun, she got out of the vehicle and ran.

The detective was addressing the situation when another witness alerted a nearby KDPS officer who was directing traffic. The officer went to the vehicle and tried to take the man into custody. However, the man allegedly resisted and ran from the officer. The officer began to chase him and alerted other nearby officers.

The man was able to get away from the officer. However, with more officers flooding the scene, the help of canine officers and bystanders reporting seeing the suspect in the area, police eventually located him hiding underneath a boat in the backyard of a home in the 1600 block of Chevy Chase Blvd.

During the search for the suspect, a canine found a jacket that the suspect had been wearing but discarded. In the jacket, officers say they found over 20 individual packages of a substance they suspected to be cocaine. KDPS said that inside the parked vehicle where the incident began, officers found a handgun with the serial number removed.

The suspect, a 22-year-old Kalamazoo man, was arrested on charges of resisting and obstructing arrest, felon in possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm with altered/obliterated identifying markings, carrying a concealed weapon and possession with intent to deliver cocaine pending review by the Kalamazoo County Prosecutor's Office.

Officials said the man also previously absconded from parole regarding a previous conviction of armed robbery.