Woman in custody after high-risk incident

By Lethbridge Herald on March 31, 2025.

Lethbridge police officers respond to a high-risk incident along 5 Avenue North on Monday afternoon. Herald photo by Alejandra Pulido-Guzman

Alejandra Pulido-Guzman – LETHBRIDGE HERALD – apulido@lethbridgeherald.com

Lethbridge Police Service have taken a woman into custody after responding to a high-risk incident along 5 Avenue North Monday afternoon. 

Police asked members of the public to stay away from the area, but multiple people showed up to witness the incident while parked across the street in the McDonald’s parking lot. 

The incident involved a woman barricaded inside a home, who voiced her concerns about the police being on her property after she was on the phone with the Mental Health help line.  

Upon members of the media arriving to the scene, it was noted that the window above the front steps leading to the door was broken. It is unclear whether it was the person inside the house who broke it, or members of LPS. 

At some point the female could be seen bleeding from one of her hands as she continued to remove broken glass from the window. She then placed a blanket on the edge of the window to avoid contact with the broken glass, and this allowed her to lean forward to yelled out the window. 

During multiple verbal encounters with members of LPS, she became agitated, cursing and saying she has done nothing wrong. 

At some point she yelled at the people across the street saying, “Hello people at McDonalds, I just wanted to say that you should never call the help line.” When she did that, multiple people across the street yelled back saying hello, while some of them say “Just let them in,” in hopes that the situation would be resolved. 

After a few hours of the incident taking place, and because the subject continued to escalate, police officers began to ask people to either stay in their vehicles or to leave, as the person was getting agitated from having people watching and this was making police’s job harder. They asked people to leave but also said that unfortunately since they were on a public place, they were unable to remove them. 

Only very few people complied and left or went back to their vehicles. On the contrary, shortly after school was out, multiple people came over with their children and police officer had to ask multiple times to no avail. 

At approximately 3:40 p.m. members of the LPS critical incident team arrived on scene.

At around 4:45 p.m. members of LPS placed police tape along the sidewalk in front of the parking lot, to prevent people to move closer to where the incident was taking place after the female became more agitated. 

Throughout the incident, which took more than five hours to be resolved, members of LPS escorted people who needed to enter nearby residences on foot, as they could not let vehicles through in or out of the area. 

As the incident was taking place just a couple of blocks away from the Immanuel Christian Elementary School, an email was sent out to families of the attending children where they indicated that a perimeter secure was done at 12:35 p.m. and everyone was being kept indoors, out of an abundance of caution. 

Parents, guardians and caregivers who were picking up students at the end of the day were asked to proceed to the alley on the west side of the school, no earlier than 3:15 p.m.

Shortly before 8 p.m. LPS sent out a media release saying they had taken one female safely into custody and as the matter was related to a mental health issue, no further information would be released.