TRAPPE, Md. – Police found a man and a woman dead inside a home Friday afternoon after a five-hour standoff that snarled beach traffic on Maryland's Eastern Shore for five hours.
The standoff began when an unidentified man called Maryland State Police around 10:30 a.m. and said he had shot and killed his wife. Police responded quickly to his home on Route 50, the main road to beaches in Maryland and Delaware. The highway was shut down in both directions for eight miles, and a nearby elementary school kept children inside.
Greg Shipley, a state police spokesman, said the phone call was the last contact authorities had with the man.
"They tried calling him on the phone; they tried a bullhorn; they tried talking to him from outside, trying to make some kind of contact," Shipley said.
Police heard only loud music coming from the home and saw no movement inside.
At 3:30 p.m., a special weapons team — which had been training nearby before the incident — went inside the home, where a man and a woman were found dead.
Autopsies will be conducted to determine how the man and woman died, said Shipley, who added that murder-suicide was a possibility. He did not know whether a gun had been recovered.
Their identities were not immediately released.
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