by Hal Erickson
synopsis
There's danger ahead for police detectives Friday (Jack Webb) and Smith (Ben Alexander) when a former mental patient barricades himself in his house and holds his children at gunpoint. Distraught because his wife has left him, the man threatens to kill himself and his children--and anyone else in the neighborhood who tries to stop him. This is one of the few black and white Dragnet episodes to be written expressly for television, and not adapted from an earlier radio broadcast.
