Police were searching for a suspect who fired a blue paintball into the windshield of a patrol car with two officers inside Sunday night, officials say.
Initially it was believed that the object that struck the windshield just before 4 p.m. was a bullet. A major dragnet ensued.
Streets from 16th to Colfax and Sherman to Logan were shut down while police with guns drawn looked around Capitol Hill searching for the person who shot at the police car.
Emergency workers were barred for several minutes from responding to a call in the area while police searched for a suspected shooting suspect, said Lt. Phil Champagne, Denver fire spokesman.
Later, several police officers got out of an ambulance with paramedics on Grant Street just north of Colfax and went inside an apartment complex.
No one was brought out in the ambulance and it was unknown why officers accompanied the medics into the building.
The two officers were waiting on the 1500 block of Grant Street for someone to jumpstart their car, which wouldn’t start, when the paintball was fired, said Virginia Quiñones, Denver police spokeswoman.
Cracked glass about the size of a tennis ball was embedded in the windshield about where an officer’s head might be, but the officer was not injured and there wasn’t a hole in the glass.
No suspect has been arrested, Quiñones said.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
