Local

Alert neighbors hold suspect at gunpoint in Canton neighborhood

Canton police arrested a wanted man with the help of an alert neighbor.

Investigators took 17-year-old Damien Fowler into custody after reports he was waving a gun behind the Laurels of Greenwood Apartment Complex. They tracked him to a home in the Hillcrest subdivision.

A woman in a home in Hillcrest Ridge saw him in the woods behind her home and, according to her daughter, he then tried to get inside.

"He wanted to jump on the porch and so when she saw that she went inside the door," Viktoriya Krasnyanskiy told Channel 2's Amy Napier Viteri. "He went around the house and started knocking on the window on the downstairs window."

The woman called police who surrounded the home and searched it.

Eddie Newman lives in the Cherokee Overlook subdivision one neighborhood over. He heard the search on his police scanner and had his gun on him when a man matching Fowler's description came over his neighbor's fence and in between their homes.

"I pulled my gun on him and I said, 'Get down on the ground let me see your hands,'" Newman told Viteri.

He said Fowler complied while he called 911. His neighbor Gary Gulasa also had a gun and recorded the arrest with his cellphone.

"He definitely picked the wrong fence and the two houses to go between. We just happened to be out there at the right time," Gulasa said.

Newman said Fowler didn't seem to be armed, but he didn't know that at the time.

"I was scared my blood was rushing. Adrenaline was going," Newman said.

Police charged Fowler with obstruction and prowling and took him to the Cherokee Adult Detention Center.