Armed Disgruntled Employee Arrested In Riverton
An anonymous tipper may have saved lives after an armed ex-employee carried weapons into the Riverton Wal-Mart. Police there got a tip around 3:00 Sunday afternoon regarding 22-year-old Dean Niedo of Arapahoe."He was a disgruntled ex-employee that had been terminated from Wal-Mart recently," says Captain Eric Murphy of the Riverton Police Department, "and that he was going there with an AK-47 type of rifle, and that he was upset and he had made some statements over Facebook that concerned the anonymous tipster. They gave the car description that he would be driving."
Murphy says they found the vehicle at Wal-Mart with an assault-type rifle and two fully loaded magazines, and located Niedo at the Customer Service desk, where he had been yelling at employees demanding to see a manager.
Captain Murphy says officers saw Niedo had two knives, one strapped to his back, and Niedo refused to come out to speak to officers and started fighting with them.
"Officers were able to take Dean to the ground. At some point during the fight, Dean was able to get his arms kind of wrapped around one of the officers, and the officer felt like Dean might have been grabbing for his gun so the other officer tased Dean Niedo at that point and the guys were able to get him in handcuffs and get him out of the Wal-Mart at that point."
Niedo is being held on a charge of resisting arrest, but Captain Murphy says other charges are likely. "We're going to meet with the County Attorney's office and see if we can't go with some kind of reckless endangering or terrorist threat," he says. "We sort of feel like that charge doesn't do the whole circumstance justice, so we're going to meet with them and see if we can't bring some additional charges to him."
Nobody was injured in the incident.
"Fortunately the anonymous tipper, I think, saved a lot of people's lives," says Murphy.