An armed man on top of a roof prompted a SWAT situation late Friday morning in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood.
Traffic was backed up near Pulaski Road and Chicago Avenue while police worked to get a man to come down from the roof. He was armed with what appeared to be a flamethrower.
Late Friday morning, the Chicago Police Department’s Office of News Affairs said officers were responding, but was unable to provide more information.
Eric McNair, an Austin area resident, told reporters at the scene that the man’s behavior had been drawing notice the last several months.
“He’s on a loudspeaker, you know, speaking anti-Semitic things. He’s always playing anti-Semitic music,” McNair said. “This is something they have to deal with on a daily basis.”
On Thursday, community members in West Humboldt Park had shared concerns about the man after he had been prominently displaying a red and yellow swastika sign from scaffolding atop the building, which is near Orr Academy High School.
“This is not safe,” Farrah Walker, coalition secretary of the West Humboldt Park Community Coalition neighborhood group, said Thursday. “People are outraged. People are shocked. People are scared.”
In May 2022, Chicago police responded to a gunshot detection alert near the building where the scaffolding is up when a man on a roof on the same block pointed “an unknown object with a laser” in the direction of a police helicopter, the department said.
Check back for updates.