Bluffton man sent to prison for hourslong standoff with police in 2022
A Bluffton man was sent to prison for an hourslong standoff with police in 2022 that began with him pointing a gun at an officer from inside his home.
Jesse Adam Rangel, 43, received a two-year prison sentence followed by three years of probation after a Beaufort County jury found him guilty last month of pointing and presenting a firearm at a person and two counts of unlawful conduct toward a child. The latter charges were applied because two children were inside the home during the incident.
The standoff began around 8 p.m. on March 18, 2022, after officers from the Bluffton Police Department responded to a complaint of loud music coming from Rangel’s home on Bakers Boulevard in the Cypress Ridge neighborhood off S.C. 170 (Okatie Highway).
One Bluffton officer noted Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” blaring “at almost concert volume” as police approached the home. He rang the doorbell and knocked before looking through the glass front door, seeing Rangel turning a corner inside the house and aiming a pistol at him through the door, according to a BPD incident report.
Rangel “walked slowly and tactically forward” with the weapon still pointed toward the officer’s chest and head, the report says. When the officer made a signal to Rangel asking him to drop the weapon, the man waved his free hand and yelled at the officer to “get off his property.” The policeman backed away from the home and met with other officers to make a de-escalation plan.
As officers from BPD and Beaufort County’s SWAT Team worked the scene and established a perimeter, police received several reports of Rangel firing shots into the air, above a passing car and into the backyard of a neighbor’s house, the report says.
Around 8:30 p.m., the report says, dispatchers told Bluffton police they had just received a 911 hangup call from Rangel in which he stated, “I will kill officers.”
The boys inside the house managed to get a cellphone and called their mother, who was also Rangel’s ex-wife. Their mother was able to relay the boys’ information about Rangel’s location to law enforcement, according to the police report.
Both boys were safely removed from the home and released to their mother around 12:50 a.m. the next morning, the report says, and Rangel was arrested about 10 minutes later. Police found a large number of weapons, ammunition and spent shotgun shells during a search of his home and backyard.
Rangel was later released from jail on a $115,000 cash bond. As part of his bond conditions, he surrendered all of his firearms to the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office, wore an electronic monitor and was barred from contacting his ex-wife and their children.
A judge also ordered Rangel to undergo a psychological evaluation. In an interview with Bluffton police’s community mental health advocate in late March 2022, Rangel said he had been working with Veteran’s Affairs “for help with his mental illness” but had not been able to get a diagnosis for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rangel had been singing karaoke with his children when his neighbors made the noise complaint to police the night of the standoff, he told the mental health advocate. He had picked up karaoke “as a coping skill” when he was stationed in Japan, according to an incident report.
At his sentencing Thursday in the Beaufort County Courthouse, Rangel was given 208 days off his prison sentence for time he had already spent in the county jail, bringing his term to about one-and-a-half years.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Rangel pleaded guilty to the charges stemming from the 2022 standoff. He was found guilty in a jury trial in June and was sentenced in late July.
This story was originally published July 29, 2025 at 12:38 PM.