Her dad, Lorenzo Martinez, imagined he had seen a sniper on a roof across the way. It was June 2006. His National Guard unit from Philadelphia had been home for seven months. For him, the battle lingered.

Martinez had barricaded himself in the blacked-out front bedroom, as if he were back in Iraq. He had threatened his son, who tried to get inside, and had punched a hole in the door.

In a panic, Martinez's wife, Maria, had called the police. Five police cars and a van screeched up to the house. A battalion of officers, it seemed, bounded up the steps.

Sgt. Anthony Villalobos, a member of Martinez's Alpha Company National Guard unit who lived up the street, came running over from his house when Maria called him. He pleaded with the officers to let him go into the room alone and calm Martinez down. The police agreed.

Villalobos shouldered his way past the bedding and furniture piled against the door. But then one of the officers tried to follow him. The officer's flashlight sent Martinez into a terrified rage.

Lorimar, clinging to the hall railing, saw her father "try to throw himself out of the window."

Martinez, a bald 44-year-old with a paunch, grappled with the intruders. It took five officers to wrestle him to the floor.

One of the officers raised his stick to land a blow, but Villalobos implored: "He's a war veteran."

Instead the officers bound Martinez, pulled him to his feet, and hauled him away.

Lorimar and her mother clung to each other in tears.

The last thing Martinez remembered, after arriving at nearby Episcopal Hospital, was looking up at a doctor or nurse.

"This will be good for you," she said, putting a needle in his arm.

He woke up later at the Kirkbride Center, a mental-health facility on North 49th Street.

"I thank God - and Villalobos - that I was taken to the hospital and not to jail," he said.

The police never pressed charges against Martinez. One of the officers he had wrestled with, a Navy veteran of the war in Iraq, apparently determined that the guardsman needed psychological help. Martinez knew the officer had given him a break.

Martinez, who liked to drink and party, had been avoiding getting help, although he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder at the Philadelphia VA hospital. Well before he flipped out that night at home, he had been exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD: black moods, anger flashes, anxiety attacks.

He remained troubled by images of what he had seen in his 101/2 months in Iraq.

In a violent period in May 2005, he had twice had narrow escapes.