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Captive in Roanoke County describes harrowing time with angry friend

Greg Elliot defused the situation by pretending to help plan a nighttime escape to Miami.

Bill Long Jr.

Chase Purdy | 981-3334

Saturday, September 14, 2013

It was an odd request that eased the tension of a terrifying moment in July, one that gave Greg Elliot the chance to escape a dangerous situation.

“I could use a burger,” Elliot recalled his captor saying.

Roanoke County General District Court Judge Vincent Lilley leaned forward from his bench with interest as Elliot testified during a preliminary hearing Friday. Sitting only feet away in a mustard-yellow jumpsuit, 47-year-old Bill Martin Long Jr. only occasionally showed emotion as he also listened to his neighbor recall the long day of his arrest.

Roanoke County police officers took Long into custody in the early hours of July 16, after a 12-hour standoff in the 200 block of Orlando Avenue in Hollins that involved several agencies and the county SWAT team. Police charged him with felony abduction, use of a firearm in a felony and misdemeanor brandishing of a firearm.

Elliot, a longtime friend of Long, said he was at work the morning of July 15 when he received a text message from Long’s wife, Takako, at about 10:30 a.m. She asked if he could come to their house.

“Can you come now?” Elliot said, recalling a second message.

He never expected the greeting he got upon entering the house.

“Put your hands in the air! Why are you in my house?” Elliot recalled Long saying. “Move one muscle motherf----- and I’ll blow your head off right now!”

Elliot testified Long was double fisting guns, one pointed at his forehead and the other at his crotch. He took a seat on a sofa, where he said his captor began to interrogate him.

“How long were you there at the house?” asked Roanoke County Commonwealth’s Attorney Randy Leach.

All told, Elliot was inside 202 Orlando Ave. for a little more than an hour, working deftly to calm his friend and figure a way to defuse the situation.

“I just kept saying, ‘Sonny, what’s going on?’ and he kept saying he’d been involved with black ops and had killed people,” Elliot testified.

In a previous hearing, Elliot said he had noticed a steady decline in Long’s mental stability during the month prior to the standoff, which he said might have been spurred by a change in his medication.

Defense attorney Jeff Dorsey has said Long had struggled since his medication had changed, but never elaborated on what Long needed medication for.

Elliot has testified that he first noticed strange behavior when Long spoke to him about his belief that President Barack Obama could control the weather, and even planned the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy.

More recently, though, Elliot said his friend spoke often about government plots to steal his identity and have him killed.

Elliot said he was finally able to ease Long’s anxiety by pretending to help plan an escape to Miami under cover of night, the first step in a scheme to get to Cuba and evade Long’s worries about a plot by U.S. authorities to kill him.

When Long asked for a burger, Elliot said he wasted no time.

“I just got up and headed straight out the front door and out of the house,” he said.

He eventually went to Wendy’s, picked up a burger, returned to the house and slipped the food through the front door. He then flagged down a state trooper and got the police involved.

“You went back? Why did you do that,” Dorsey asked.

“I was very at odds with what was the right thing to do,” Elliot said.

“Bull crap!” said Long, prompting a court bailiff to grab his shoulders and keep him seated.

After attorneys finished presenting evidence, Lilley convicted Long on the misdemeanor brandishing charge and sentenced him to the maximum punishment of a year behind bars. The judge also certified the two felony charges to a grand jury and denied Long bond.

“This is as bad a case as I’ve ever heard,” he said.

Saturday, September 14, 2013