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"It was probably a drug overdose or a seizure," a responder at the scene told Daily Voice. "They're treating it as a suicide."
The standoff with Zire King began around 1:20 p.m. after NYPD detectives went with Hackensack police to a home at First and Passaic streets looking for King, who was wanted in the killing of MTA conductor Jacqueline Dicks in Brooklyn three days earlier.
"Soon as they got there he locked himself in the apartment," a law enforcement officer at the scene told Daily Voice. "There were no acts of violence."
A woman there told them that King had barricaded himself in a second-floor bedroom and might be armed, Capt. Timothy Lloyd said later.
A Bergen County Regional SWAT team was called, as was the sheriff's Bomb Squad. Streets were closed off and more than a dozen seniors at the Martin Luther King Jr. Senior Center across the street were locked down.
Negotiators tried talking with King but had no luck.
About 5:45 p.m., the SWAT team tossed in two gas canisters through windows.
Exactly an hour later, the tactical squad stormed the house.
They called for a medic soon after, and King was pronounced dead at the scene.
At that point, city police escorted the seniors from the center.
The NYPD said King had driven Dicks home after work Monday night. He then shot the 41-year-old mother of six and grandmother of three in the back of the head with a .40-caliber revolver, they said.
They said they found the gun in the trunk of his 2009 Mercedes Benz.
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