PORT ANGELES – A Port Angeles man was charged Monday with shooting at a Clallam County sheriff’s deputy with a paintball gun.
Wesley Olsen, 43 of Port Angeles, was charged Monday in Clallam County Superior Court with third degree assault of a police officer.
According to a police statement filed in court, Deputy James McLaughlin, who was on duty, was talking with someone on West 16th Street in Port Angeles at 4 a.m. when someone across the alley yelled at him and fired a paintball at his head, missing him.
The person who fired the paintball presumably entered the house from which the paintball came, McLaughlin told police officers when they arrived.
What followed, according to court documents, was a 90-minute effort to get Olsen out of the house.
Port Angeles officer David Dombrowski knocked on the door, banged on the windows, and phoned the house, but there was no response, his court statement said.
Just before 5 a.m., Dombrowski received a search warrant to enter the house and search for firearms and paintball guns, court documents said.
A few minutes later, a woman came out of the house and said that she and Olsen had been sleeping.
She said she only recently had realized officers were outside because she had awakened and seen bright lights, the court documents said.
While the woman stood outside talking to police, Olsen was seen closing the house’s front door.
More phone calls to the house went unanswered, the court documents said.
At 5:30 a.m., Dombrowski and three other officers knocked down the house’s door and arrested Olsen.
Police found a paintball gun wrapped in a pair of green shorts under a dresser in a bedroom, the police statement said.
A pink paintball was taken as evidence from the front stoop in line with where McLaughlin had been standing and the back yard of Olsen’s house, the police statement said.
McLaughlin identified Olsen’s voice as the one he heard when he was shot at.
Bail was set at $10,000.
Olsen remained in custody in the Clallam County on Tuesday.
