By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 20, 2006; A01

Yanick Simeon recounts the crisis at her family's restaurant, Chez Yon Yon. Her two children were among the hostages. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

The Haitian restaurant Chez Yon Yon doesn't typically serve curried shrimp, but since Lyonel and Yanick Simeon are still shepherding their business through its first arduous year, they agreed to prepare the dish to please the two young gentlemen who came in for takeout Wednesday evening.

While the plantains were frying, the two men sat in small wicker chairs at the entrance of the Prince George's County restaurant, near a sign advertising the restaurant's money transfer business -- an unsuccessful service that hadn't operated in a few months. It seems no one noticed that the men were wearing bulletproof vests under their shirts.

For the next six hours, the two men would transform a warm fall evening into a hostage crisis and a tense standoff with Prince George's police.

Yesterday, Yanick and Lyonel Simeon told their story of the attempted robbery at 834 Chillum Rd., while Lyonel recovered from a beating and their 7-year-old daughter, the last hostage to get out, remained too skittish to go to school.

"This had all the makings of an absolute disaster," said Capt. Robert Liberati of the Prince George's County police.

But it ended with no shots fired and the arrest of two suspects -- Oliver Tunstall, 26, of Lanham and Darren Johnson, 19, of Landover.

Yanick Simeon said she feels grateful to be alive.

"God was right here," she said, standing amid the bloodstains on the restaurant's tile floor. "I don't know how else this could have gone the way it went. God had to be right here."

The day got off to a good start. That morning, a package arrived containing a framed restaurant review from last month's Washington Post. Lyonel Simeon proudly mounted it on the wall by the stairs. The couple's two children, son Yephnick, 11, and daughter Phabiene, 7, bustled around the restaurant, helping out. It seemed that the family's dream -- the moment they hoped for when, short of money, they slept on friends' couches -- might actually be realized.

"He was jumping up and down yesterday morning, saying this will stay on the wall for my children even when I'm dead," Yanick Simeon, 34, said of her husband, who was a well-known trombone player in Haiti before he came to the United States in the 1980s. "This was the same day. The same day."

It had been a relatively slow night when the two men walked in. Fewer than 10 guests were seated, though the Simeons were expecting a party of 18 to arrive shortly. Yanick Simeon hurried out the back door and down Riggs Road to the Save-A-Lot to buy spices.

Not long before 6 p.m., the men identified by police as Tunstall and Johnson paid for their carryout with a $20 bill. When Lyonel Simeon handed them change, one of the men pulled out a gun.

"Freeze," the man said, according to Lyonel Simeon. "Give me the money."

Many from the community came out to support YonYon and Yanick.

Lyonel Simeon said he handed over the money from the register and his pockets, as well as his jewelry, but the men wanted more. His wife said the men demanded the nonexistent funds from the money transfer business.

Lyonel Simeon took one of the gunmen upstairs and "showed him the safe was open and there was no money inside." He said that the gunman pistol-whipped him and that he also was beaten with a VCR and a fire extinguisher.

"I said, 'You don't have to do that,' " he recalled.

Lyonel Simeon said his head wounds required nine staples.

When Yanick Simeon return to the restaurant, she said, she found both doors locked, and, looking through a downstairs window, she saw customers on the floor and one man stalking about the room.

"I thought everybody was dead," she said. "I was screaming."

She said she turned around to find two Prince George's police officers she knew standing behind her. They were coming for a meal, she said. The appearance of police caused enough commotion to bring the gunman down from upstairs, she said, at which point her husband poked his bleeding head out the second-story window.

"Help me, please, help me. You have to catch me," she recalled him saying. "I said, 'Honey, you have to jump.' "

She said yesterday that she believes he would have been killed if he had stayed.

Lyonel Simeon crashed down into the bushes and escaped. One of the gunmen went out a second-story window on the other side of the building, leapt onto a roof and then landed on the wooden deck stairs, she said. Police quickly arrested him.

The second man, identified as Tunstall, remained inside with as many as six hostages, including the Simeons' two children and a 9-year-old girl, authorities said.

Police moved in. About 30 tactical officers, including a SWAT team and conflict negotiators, rushed to the scene. Police blocked off Riggs Road, Chillum Road and nearby streets. A helicopter flew overhead, and an armored personnel carrier shuttled between the restaurant and the improvised command post outside a nearby Giant supermarket.

As dusk settled, Nixon Clermont, 44, a Haitian immigrant who plays kompa music with Lyonel Simeon, anxiously paced behind a police barricade on Chillum Road about 400 yards from the restaurant.

"I'm numb. I got the calls from the guys and I'm driving like a madman to get down here," he said. "This is unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it."

Police quickly contacted the hostage taker on his cellphone, and they talked to him repeatedly throughout the evening, said Cpl. Diane Richardson, a police spokeswoman.

"There were times he would just hang up. Other times he would talk," she said. "We had an officer who maintained contact with him and asked him to surrender peacefully."

At one point, a police officer stuck a hose through a window into the kitchen to extinguish burning food, Richardson said. About 30 firefighters were standing by.

Tunstall did not injure the children, police said. Yanick Simeon said her children told her that Johnson was the more aggressive of the two gunmen and that Tunstall allowed them to watch television. Over a period of hours, all of the hostages managed to escape or were released until only the robber and 7-year-old Phabiene remained inside.

About 10:40 p.m., an officer inside the armored truck used his public-address system. He told Tunstall to switch lights on and off if he could hear the police, and Tunstall complied, police said.

"I know you can hear me, and I know you're listening," the officer's voice boomed out. The spectators, who were kept far away, strained to listen.

The officer said he knew that Tunstall wasn't sure what to do, "and that's normal."

"Nobody's going to hurt you or harm you in any way," the officer said. "You're not a bad person."

"You were good enough to let the people come out," he went on. "Everybody here just wants you to come out."

From the police barricade on Chillum Road, Audrey Clarke, 35, who works in the grants office of the National Institutes of Health, suddenly pointed at the second-story window.

"I saw him! He's upstairs!" she said, as a dark shape passed by the window.

"This could last all night," Clermont said.

"I think he's going to give up," Clarke said of the hostage. "He has to. He's got no place to go."

Police negotiators eventually persuaded the robber to give the cellphone to Phabiene and let her go.

"We directed her outside. We told her it was okay," said Richardson, the police spokeswoman. "She was on the phone with us the entire time she was walking out."

With no hostages remaining, police fired tear gas through second-story windows, and Tunstall emerged within five to 10 minutes, police said. He was arrested without further incident.

Both men were charged with assault, armed robbery and use of a handgun; Tunstall was additionally charged with false imprisonment, police said.

The Simeons plan to reopen Chez Yon Yon tomorrow.

"This was police work at its best," said Prince George's Chief Melvin C. High.