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YOU’LL FIND THIS ONLY ON CLIFFVIEW PILOT: South Hackensack firefighters dramatically carried a battered woman and her 6-month-old boy from their second-story bathroom before dawn this morning while the Bergen County SWAT team negotiated inside with her knife-wielding husband, a former Army solider, an officer at the scene told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. Steven Spalnick, 41, is being held on $70,000 bail at the Bergen County Jail, charged with three counts of aggravated assault on a police officer, aggravated assault against his wife, endangering his boy, two counts of weapons possession and resisting arrest.
Spalnick got into an argument with his wife that escalated before midnight, with him hitting her, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the situation told CLIFFVIEW PILOT, soon after the initial call came in. Spalnick
eventually locked himself in a bedroom of the upstairs apartment.COURTESY South Hackensack FD A nearly five-hour roller-coaster round of talks followed — first with South Hackensack police and then with negotiators from the Bergen County Police Department SWAT Team.
“Two [BCPD] negotiators took turns with him. Things were good, then they were bad, then they were good again,” an officer at the scene told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
“We were concerned because he said he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,” he said.
No one wanted to take any chances, so the fire department was dispatched.
“They were amazing,” the officer said. “They stuck it out the whole night and were heroes in all this.”
It began with Spalnick’s third wife calling for medical attention from the locked bathroom around 11 o’clock last night after her husband hit her, apparently for not inviting him to a Christmas party, the officer told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
“He beat her so bad, she had to be admitted to the hospital,” he said.
Her condition at Hackensack University Medical Center couldn’t be determined earlier today.
The two met and lived mostly in Pennsylvania before moving to the upstairs apartment of a two-family house at 449 Chestnut Avenue.
“The couple has a pretty volatile relationship,” the officer said. “A relative told us she was concerned that he might be a little unhinged, so people were backgrounding him while this was going on.”
The medics arrived to find Spalnick with a knife in each hand, the officer said. His wife was locked with their boy in the bathroom, where the assault occurred, he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. So the medics retreated and called police.
South Hackensack police chased the knife-wielding Spalnick into another room and summoned the SWAT team, the officer told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
“He chose a bedroom in the corner of the house, so he was basically trapped,” he said. “The only way out was the window.”
The house was surrounded, so that wasn’t likely. Meanwhile, police quickly ushered out the people who live downstairs.
“They have family in the area,” the officer said, “so they had a place to go.”Around 2 a.m., firefighters “raised a ladder to the bathroom window in back of the house and got the woman and child out,” he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
At that point, it was a matter of talking things through with Spalnick.
“The holidays affect some people really hard,” the officer said. “But the negotiators stayed with him, kept him talking. He eventually began crying.
“He was still a little weepy when he walked out.”
Spalnick is being held on $70,000 bail at the Bergen County Jail, charged with three counts of aggravated assault on a police officer, aggravated assault against his wife and endangering his boy, along with two counts of weapons possession and resisting arrest.
A somewhat similar incident involving the Bergen County PD SWAT team happened in South Hackensack nearly 18 years ago to the day:
On Christmas Eve 1993, a man upset over money problems fired at police during a 15-hour standoff while holding his girlfriend and her two children hostage at the Jade East Motel on Route 46.
The SWAT team got him out without injury.
“The holidays are the worst time for homicides and domestic violence,” then-Bergen County Prosecutor Jay Fahy told reporters at the time. “It’s the time of year people often realize they don’t have what they want.”
Wayne Cole, 42, is still serving a 20-year sentence in state prison. He’s not eligible for parole until Dec. 23, 2013.
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