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Gene Kennedy and Marc Giauque reporting An ex-convict kidnapped his estranged wife, lead police on a chase, then held officers at bay for at least two hours. The entire ordeal stretched across the Salt Lake valley but eventually ended peacefully in Midvale.
The suspect's wife kicked him out of the house a couple weeks ago; that's according to the victim's teenage son. So far, that's the only reason to explain a bizarre chain of events that came to an end at a park in Midvale.
Guns were drawn, with all eyes on an armed man inside a gray SUV threatening to commit suicide. That man was 32-year-old Steve Larson, an ex-con convicted in 1999 of theft and burglary. He wound up serving prison time from 2001 to 2005.
Heather Pappas, a neighbor, said, "I never knew he had a record. But honestly something had to have snapped."
The chain of events still shocks the suspect's neighbors. Police say before the standoff, Larson bound his wife's hands and kidnapped her at gunpoint from their Cottonwood Heights home. He then took her to a townhome in West Jordan.
The woman who lives there says she briefly dated Larson, and he was after money. Police got wind of a kidnapping in progress and chased Larson back to the Cottonwood Heights-Holladay area, where his wife somehow broke free.
Neighbor Sam Pappas saw her in the moments after. "She looked a little beaten, a little bruised, a little scraped but no worse than that. She'll recover," he said.
West Jordan Police sergeant Greg Butler said, "She was able to run away, and officers got in a short foot pursuit with him. He got back in the car."
The chase continued to a Midvale park across from Hillcrest High, and police spent two hours trying to reason with a man with a pistol.
Lt. John Fassett, with the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, said, "He was talking to police on the cell phone, then we got to the point where he was talking face-to-face out of the car to negotiators."
And it worked. Cool heads calmed a suicidal suspect and persuaded him to give up. Tonight Steve Larson is in jail, and his estranged wife, aside from being emotionally traumatized, is physically OK.
E-mail: gkennedy@ksl.com
E-mail: mgiauque@ksl.com
