A 31-year-old Palm Springs man was arrested outside a Wawa on South Congress Avenue on Tuesday afternoon after telling a crisis text line he had an AR-15 and planned to kill everyone inside before forcing police to shoot him. Officers who converged on the store found no gun anywhere near him.
Andrew David Tumey began texting the Crisis Text Line at 2:23 p.m. Tuesday, according to court documents cited by CBS12. Four minutes later, at 2:27 p.m., he wrote that he was going to kill himself in the next five minutes. By 2:31 p.m. he described a plan to rob the Wawa before forcing a fatal confrontation with police, and at 2:38 p.m. he identified the weapon as an AR-15 and threatened to kill everyone inside, per the same court records.
At 3:02 p.m., Tumey told the crisis line operators he wanted police to arrive so he could die in a suicide-by-cop scenario, and he separately said he intended to force officers to kill him, police say. Mobile crisis dispatchers alerted the Palm Springs Police Department, and officers responded to the Wawa at 3950 S. Congress Avenue, arriving at 3:09 p.m.
Officers Find No Weapon Despite the Threats
A responding officer spotted Tumey lying on the sidewalk west of the store, next to a black backpack. Backup officers ordered him to the ground at gunpoint and intercepted him before he could enter the Wawa, though he had already attempted to enter the store’s restrooms. Dispatchers confirmed his identity by calling the phone number tied to the crisis-line texts…