Swat

The Special Weapons and Tactics team was called in when officers attempting to serve a warrant were confronted by a man who locked himself in a house on Stiles Street in the Bridesburg section yesterday. The man had two Rottweilers and the cops feared he was armed. SWAT team members (above) covered James W. Hall, 27, as he surrendered to others (right). He was charged with resisting arrest. Police said Hall was not armed.

Mark Richard Geisenheyner, the man suspected of shooting five people in cold blood at a rural Montgomery County house Saturday night - killing two, including a 2-year-old boy - was asleep when the acquaintance with whom he'd sought refuge called the cops on him. The acquaintance, identified by neighbors only as Gary, and his wife, Trish, had found Geisenheyner outside their house on Post Road in Trainer Borough, Delaware County, when they came...

I THINK Tom Corbett's most newsworthy Cabinet member - that would be Health Secretary Eli Avila - might be on to something. Perhaps you saw the Inquirer story about Avila ordering nine blue SWAT team-type jackets for himself and senior staff with DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH on the front and back, and - for himself - a badge with SECRETARY OF HEALTH curled around the state seal. (And by "state seal" I don't mean a clapping, beach ball-balancing seal; I mean the official commonwealth seal: sailing ship, plow, three sheaves of wheat.)

Philadelphia's garbage strike ended three weeks ago, but a vestige of the walkout remains: flies. And they are here in force. "My husband is presently going around the kitchen killing flies as I am trying to cook," Rosemary Cubas, who lives in the 2100 block of North Second Street, said on a recent evening. "We have never in my house had so many flies. They're outside. They're inside. They're everywhere. It's getting on people's nerves. " To Kyong Yi and her mother, Poksun Yi, it seems as if the flies own the streets of Center City these days.

Florence High coach Art Bobik, his voice hoarse, said he couldn't understand why his boys' basketball team seemed to have so much less energy than Gloucester in last night's NJSIAA South Jersey Group 1 quarterfinal. Ian James, Gloucester's crafty point guard, supplied the answer: "There was talk all around school about how Florence beat us in the football playoffs last year and how they knocked us out of the basketball playoffs, so we had a lot of things working for us tonight.

"Shoot two rounds to the body! Clear the weapon! Shoot one slug to the head!" Such were the orders one recent Friday as the county's top guns - and experts in explosives, chemical agents and assorted assault weapons - gathered at Medford Township's outdoor police shooting range for Top Gun 1995 Team Competition, a rare opportunity to match wits and weapons. "God forbid you ever have to shoot someone, but if you do, you must shoot to kill," said Dave Ekelburg, a member of the Burlington City Special Weapons and Tactical team who specializes in dealing with chemical agents.

Planning for the worst, Middletown Township Police Chief Frank McKenna told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday night that he wants to set up a SWAT-style "multi-agency special reaction team" before a hostage situation or other crisis takes his department by surprise. "It's not a matter of will it happen here in Bucks County, but when it will happen," McKenna told the supervisors. With little debate, the supervisors voted, 4-0, to allow McKenna to join other departments in the area, including Warminster and Northampton Townships, to set up a heavily trained and armed interdepartmental team to serve dangerous arrest warrants, and deal with hostage incidents and other high-risk situations in much of Lower Bucks County.

Since Clarence Weatherspoon frequently is compared to Charles Barkley, the occasion of Barkley's first visit to the Spectrum as a visiting player perhaps is the proper time to note a statistical category in which he appears to have Sir Charles beaten stone cold. Weatherspoon, the Sixers' rookie forward from Southern Mississippi, scored 18 points in yesterday's 110-100 loss to the Barkley-led Phoenix Suns. But Weatherspoon had three of his 21 shots blocked to up his season total to 121. This is historic stuff, when you consider that the unofficial league record for collected rejection slips, set last season by the Charlotte Hornets' Kendall Gill, is 123. It's unofficial because Harvey Pollack, the Sixers' director of statistical information, began compiling the statistic on his own last year.

It was clean-up day in Holmesburg yesterday. City workers picked up trash and tried to spruce up this mostly tidy working class neighborhood. But when two anti-graffiti workers knocked on the door of a home to offer to help clean up graffiti painted on the house, little did they know they would be running for their lives. Joan Campiglia, 55, answered the door on Oakmont Street near Torresdale Avenue, and began cursing at them, police said. Her son, George Rush, 36, then came to the door, grabbed his mother around the neck and fired what looked like a small gun at the workers, police said.

A young male worker, cold and shaken, was rescued last night from a walk-in freezer at a Burger King at Eighth and Market Streets where a bandit with a shotgun had locked him inside during an attempted holdup, police said. When a police S.W.A.T. team entered the fast-food restaurant about an hour after the incident began, the gunman had escaped. Three female employees scrambled to safety after one of them spotted the gunman entering the restaurant and alerted her supervisor.

NORTH BEND, Wash. - After a 22-hour standoff, police blew the top off a rugged mountain bunker near Seattle on Saturday, only to find their target - a man believed to be a murder suspect who holed up there - dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside. Authorities had not positively identified the body as 41-year-old Peter Keller, who had not been seen since his wife and daughter were found shot to death last weekend, King County Sheriff's Sgt. Katie Larson said. A bomb squad cleared the bunker, built into a ridge in the Cascade Mountains, to make sure there were no booby-traps before detectives entered.

Swenson's basketball team swatted away 17 shots by visiting Mastbaum, but the Lions still needed a late basket by Marcus Tillery to pull out a 49-47 win in one of seven Public League games decided in the closing seconds on Thursday afternoon. Tillery, a 6-foot-6 senior center, piled up nine of his team's blocked shots to go with 11 points, 12 rebounds and two assists, capped by his putback with 3 seconds to play. Jay Hardy chipped in with 14 points, 5 rebounds and 3 blocks. Also in the Public League, Paul Robeson's Aaquil Craft-Brown sank two foul shots with 5 seconds left to secure a 50-48 win at Freire Charter.

His persona doesn't match his game, but it has continued to work out remarkably well for C.J. Aiken, St. Joseph's 6-foot-9, 200-pound, high-flying, rim-rattling sophomore center. Aiken has already made his share of bring-the-house-down dunks and has become the nation's leading sultan of swat. Yet for somebody with such a flamboyant game, Aiken's personality is the polar opposite. Despite making one spectacular play after another for a 7-3 St. Joseph's team already closing in on last season's 11-win total, Aiken treats each highlight play with indifference.

DREXEL WAS trying to do something it had never done before, which is beat Saint Joseph's in consecutive meetings. And the Dragons were also trying to win on Hawk Hill for the first time since 1978. Last season, the Dragons won by a dozen in West Philly, which gave them four wins in the last seven in this series. And they did so mostly by pounding the Hawks off the boards. Last night at Hagen Arena was different. The Hawks, who have no seniors, and really only one junior of note, don't look to be anywhere near the same group that lost 22 times a year ago. And the Dragons, who were picked to win the Colonial Athletic Association, aren't whole yet. The result was a 62-49 St. Joe's win that was punctuated by a program-record 16 blocks, including a career-high-tying nine from sophomore C.J. Aiken, and eight dunks, many of the alley-oop variety.

WHEN SAINT Joseph's recruited C.J. Aiken out of Plymouth-Whitemarsh, everybody knew it might not work as planned, but if it did work, there was the possibility it could be a program-changer. All of the returns are not in, but the 6-9 Aiken is, at the very least, becoming a regular game-changer. In the first 8 1/2 minutes of its home opener Saturday against Penn State, the Hawks scored 22 points and allowed none. Aiken opened the game with a corner three. In the 22-0 blitz, Aiken also had two dunks, two blocks and several more alterations.

A paroled burglar who absconded from a Philadelphia halfway house Nov. 6 fired on police from his suburban motel room Sunday night, then apparently took his own life as a SWAT team closed in, according to police. Police in Lower Providence Township said they issued a warrant for Ricardo Soraya Noris, 48, of the 3800 block of Germantown Pike, Collegeville, after they learned he was wanted for a parole violation. When officers received a tip that Noris was staying at the Blue Eagle Motel at 3470 Ridge Pike in Collegeville, they knocked on his door, and were met with "several gunshots" from inside the room.

How much is a promise worth? More than $67,000 in the case of Delaware and Montgomery counties. In July, the counties vowed to pay for the damage done to a Trainer, Delaware County, home by a SWAT team called in to capture a murder suspect there. Almost four months later, Gary Krobath - the man who called police to tell them fugitive Mark Geisenheyner was in his home - is still trying to piece his life together. Before making his way to Krobath's home, Geisenheyner, a career criminal, shot five people in a remote Douglass Township farmhouse, killing three, including a 2-year-old child.

A man remained barricaded in a Northeast Philadelphia home Saturday night in the 9400 block of Bustleton Avenue near Welsh Road. Police said they received a call around 6:30 p.m. about a domestic disturbance there. SWAT team members were sent to the scene and traffic was detoured around the area. Police said no injuries were reported. The man, who was not identified, was believed to be alone. - Rita Giordano

WASHINGTON - With one strike to go Sunday, the visiting fans that commandeered Nationals Park roared as the Phillies players and coaches perked up in the dugout. The reward for enduring 5 hours and 50 minutes worth of rain delays in a span of four days was one strike away. Antonio Bastardo was the pitcher who would throw that strike, as good as any guarantee in baseball this season. "Sometimes we miss a pitch," Bastardo said later, after the Phillies had lost, 5-4, to the Washington Nationals in 10 innings.

Man critically hurt in shooting * Levick Street near Hawthorne, Mayfair A man continued to fight for his life yesterday after being shot inside a house in Mayfair Saturday morning. At 1:25 a.m. Saturday, police found a 34-year-old man with gunshot wounds to his left thigh and lower back on Frankford Avenue near Robbins Street. He was taken to Aria Health's Torresdale hospital, where he remained yesterday in critical condition. Police said a witness later told them the victim was shot by a man with whom he was fighting inside a house on Levick Street near Hawthorne.