GUNMAN INVADES CHERRY BOMB Hostage situation defused by quick-thinking bartender

Powers Boothe was taken hostage by a gunman at The Cherry Bomb last night.

By Ariel Mutha-Tafoya

FSN Sports

A man screaming “Where are the child slaves?!” and wielding an AR-15 assault rifle stormed into The Cherry Bomb Café Tuesday night, creating a tense hostage situation until a quick-witted bartender managed to surprise and subdue him. No one was injured during the incident.

Police were called to the storied 12South nightspot around 9 p.m. after Chief Mixologist Devlin Redd triggered a security alarm. The armed intruder told patrons that he had read reports on Breitbart and Infowars that café owner QCurl Sharif operated a child sex slavery ring from a basement tunnel complex at the club and had come to stop it.

When a police S.W.A.T. team arrived, they found that the gunman had taken the club’s only patron as a hostage — actor Powers Boothe, who was watching the Bakers-Black Dogs playoff game on TV. The tense standoff ended, Redd told reporters, after he threw a Touchdown Taser® in the gunman’s face and the potent ingredients in the drink temporarily blinded him. 

The man, who was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” ballcap, was identified as G.D. “Yosemite” Sams, a right-wing blogger from Idaho. As he was led away, Sams — whom records show to be a Fidalgo Island Sea Hogs season-ticket holder — screamed, “You should be going after Sharif! Lock him up! Lock him up!”

Sharif, who relocated to London in August, could not be reached for comment.

After the gunman was subdued, Redd offered to take reporters into the basement of the café, which does contain a tunnel connecting The Cherry Bomb to the next-door offices of Vatican emissary Cardinal Giorgio Leonardo. (The cardinal was not present during the attack.) “I hope this can clear things up a little,” said Redd as reporters walked through the musty basement area, where they could see nothing but several empty cardboard boxes, a mannequin dressed in Bakers licensed apparel, and a football autographed by the late Rob Bironas. “We want the truth to be known,” said Redd. “Truth is the best disinfectant. In fact, it’s one of the secret ingredients in the Touchdown Taser®.”

By Tuesday morning, The Cherry Bomb was back open for brunch, and police officers were being treated to complimentary plates of huevos rancheros and New Mexico salsa verde. “We were lucky last night,” said one of the officers, who declined to give his name. “Since the Bakers left town, nobody but Powers Boothe and the occasional tourist comes here anymore. In the old days, we might have had a bloodbath.”

BREAKING: Authorities in Istanbul want to question Sharif about yesterday’s assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey. A spokesman for the Turkish federal police noted that Sharif’s well-known connection to Ukrainian chocolate mogul Petro Poroschenko, combined with a little-publicized visit he made to Turkey a week ago, make him “a person of intense interest.”