CLAREMONT — Police work never stops. Not even to honor police work.
Minutes before the city was set to swear in its new police chief Friday afternoon, every officer attending the ceremony rushed out of the auditorium, responding to a call of what police later described as “a fight with weapons” at an address on Pearl Street.
The result of the call was a first-degree assault charge against a 33-year-old Claremont woman after one person was shot and another sustained a head injury.
When police arrived on the scene, they found one person shot in the leg and a second person who had been “struck in the head with a blunt object,” according to a news release issued by the Claremont Police Department.
Authorities did not identify who fired the shot or wielded the blunt object but said Samantha McGlynn was charged with first-degree assault, a felony, and taken into custody, where she remained as of Friday evening.
The victims were transported to Valley Regional Hospital for treatment; their injuries were considered serious but not life-threatening injuries, police said.
Claremont Police Chief Brent Wilmot, in an interview on Saturday, said, the people involved in the incident “were all acquainted with each other” and there is no ongoing danger to the public. He declined to specify how the people involved knew each other or what the motivation might have been, citing the continuing investigation.
“We’re still trying to establish what happened and figure out why this thing took place,” he said.
The Pearl Street incident occurred on Wilmot’s first day on the job as Claremont’s new chief, delaying carefully laid plans for the veteran police officer’s public swearing-in ceremony.
Police were alerted to the shooting incident at about 12:45 p.m., only 15 minutes before Wilmot was scheduled to be sworn in at 1 p.m. at the Claremont Opera House.
The first few rows of the audience were reserved for Claremont police officers, all of whom immediately cleared out and rushed to Pearl Street the moment the call came, Wilmot said.
“There was not one police officer from Claremont there,” Wilmot said.
A command post was quickly established, and city police benefited from assistance from other law enforcement officials who were in town to see the baton passed to Wilmot from outgoing chief Mark Chase.
Wilmot said he had intended his swearing-in ceremony to be a time to acknowledge and show gratitude to the city’s police officers — Wilmot himself was with the department for 18 years before he took the chief’s job in Newport, after which he was recruited back to his hometown — only for it dashed by the call to duty.
“I looked at the ceremony as all about them,” Wilmot said of his fellow officers. “And they weren’t there to appreciate it.”
Wilmot, Deputy Chief Mark Grasso and Chase held back and after the delay “expedited” the swearing-in because “we just didn’t have time to enjoy the pomp and circumstance,” Wilmot said.
But that’s the nature of police work, Wilmot explained.
“Obviously, somebody gets shot, that takes priority over everything,” he said.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
