Neighbor describes events leading to standoff

Ryan Spidal was sound asleep about 7:25 Tuesday morning when someone started trying to kick in the door next to his bed - the one that led from his ground-floor bedroom to the apartment in the basement.

Jolted awake by the violent pounding, Spidal says he looked through the partially open door to see his downstairs neighbor, Nathan Lenahan, peering back at him. According to Spidal, Lenahan was yelling and brandishing a six-inch hunting knife.

"He was like, 'You're not listening to me, are you? If you did, I would have to kill you,'" Spidal says.

The early-morning confrontation led to a five-hour standoff between Lenahan and law enforcement.

Local and state police converged on the two-story rental house at 327 N.W. 25th St., in the heart of Oregon State University's Greek Row. As a crowd of curious students looked on, SWAT team members armed with assault rifles surrounded the house. Shortly after noon, one of them fired his Taser through a broken window and stunned Lenahan, who was taken to the Benton County Jail and now faces multiple charges.

In addition, Albany police say Lenahan tried several times last summer to lure young women into his van, which was equipped for filming pornographic movies, although he is not suspected of any crimes in connection with those incidents.

Spidal, a junior majoring in exercise science at Oregon State University, wasn't hurt in Tuesday's incident, although he admits he was so badly rattled at first that he couldn't operate his touch-screen phone to call police.

In an interview Wednesday, he recounted his experience.

"I heard this pounding," Spidal said. "I look up, and he's like, "Are you listening to me?'"

At that point, Spidal said, Lenahan started forcing his way through the door.

"He kicks it open, and he's, like, yelling at me: 'Who are you?'"

Spidal said Lenahan "was kind of babbling," raving about God and accusing Spidal and his roommates of various crimes, such as spying on him through the door and tapping his phone conversations.

Trying to defuse the situation, Spidal said, he told Lenahan as calmly as he could to leave.

"I just told him to close the door, go back downstairs and just leave me alone," Spidal said.

And that's just what Lenahan did, Spidal said. But suddenly he was back.

"He came up again, like, 30 seconds later," Spidal said. "He was kind of trying to apologize - but he still had the knife in his hand."

Again, however, Lenahan left. Too jittery to use his phone, Spidal went upstairs to talk with roommate Will Rehse. They decided to call the police.

Lenahan had his own entrance to the basement, so he didn't need to use the door through Spidal's bedroom, the roommates said. The door was always locked, and as far as they knew it was never used - until just a few days before this week's altercation.

Spidal was away for Spring Break last week, but when he came back he noticed signs that someone had tried to force open the door. And on Sunday night, Spidal says, he heard a tapping coming from the basement side, followed by Lenahan's voice asking if anyone was home.

Spidal said he answered but got no response. Instead, he heard footsteps going back down the basement stairs.

Rehse, a junior in accounting, has been in the 25th Street house since February 2008. Spidal and a third roommate, civil engineering junior Kyle Hannon, moved in last fall.

The three said they rarely had contact with Lenahan, even though he lived downstairs.

They would hear Lenahan's hardcore heavy metal music playing through the door, occasionally see him bringing in groceries from his van, and would sometimes say hello. Lenahan never said anything in response, they said, and he seemed to avoid human contact.

"I've known him as the creepy van man since I moved in," Rehse said.

Still, Rehse added, he was shocked by what happened this week.

"I would never have suspected him to be violent," he said of his downstairs neighbor. "This really came out of the blue to me."

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.