FORT MONTGOMERY, New York (Reuters) – A tense standoff at a motel with a man who fled the scene of his estranged wife’s murder and abducted their two young daughters ended on Friday when he committed suicide, police said.
Anthony Trapp, 39, of Old Bridge, New Jersey, was found dead of apparently self-inflicted wounds in a room at the motel in Fort Montgomery, New York, just over the New Jersey border at about 9 a.m., the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
His two young daughters, Emma, 5, and Sophia, 20 months, had been released from the room about an hour earlier and were taken to a nearby hospital and determined to be in good heath, authorities said.
The overnight standoff was triggered by an Amber Alert issued for the girls after a relative of their mother, Heather Trapp, 37, called police late Thursday out of concern for her safety.
She was picking up the girls on Thursday afternoon from a visit with their father, her estranged husband.
Police found the woman murdered in the Old Bridge home and Trapp and the two girls missing.
“It was a stabbing,” said Robert Travisano, chief of detectives at the prosecutor’s office. “He was a person of interest.”
Police tracked Trapp and the girls to the motel. In the early morning hours, the girls were released from the room.
A witness said police then lobbed an apparent smoke bomb through the motel room window.
Soon afterward, police entered the room and found Trapp dead, said Jim O’Neill, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office.
He declined to release more details, saying only, “I don’t have a report that he had a gun.”
(Reporting by Scott Barr and Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Jerry Norton)