Puddle of Mudd’s Wes Scantlin Pepper-Balled by SWAT Team After Standoff

Puddle of Mudd frontman Wes Scantlin was booked at a local jail on Wednesday (July 31st) on an outstanding warrant and for resisting arrest, stemming from an incident in which he allegedly refused to get out of his car and was subsequently pepper-balled by a SWAT team.

According to TMZ, Scantlin was pulled over in his black Hummer H2 in Burbank, California, for a traffic stop, and when officers found out that the rocker had an outstanding warrant for possessing a weapon at an airport, they asked him to get out of the car.

Scantlin apparently refused to exit the vehicle, at which point a crisis negotiator was called. Officers then tried to use pepper spray on the singer-guitarist, but that didn’t work either. At that point, they called in a SWAT team, which promptly broke one of the car windows and shot non-lethal pepper balls to finally get the musician to exit his car.

After being taken to a local hospital to flush out his eyes, Scantlin was booked at a local jail and released. A court date has been set for August 20th.

Scantlin has a long history of run-ins with the law, including an arrest for trespassing last year. Prior to that, he faced another trespassing charge in 2016 for an incident at the same house, which he bought in 2005 for $1.7 million but lost to foreclosure roughly 10 years later.

The Puddle of Mudd singer was also arrested for trying to bring a BB gun on board a flight at LAX in 2017 (presumably the incident for which he had the outstanding warrant), and for taking a joyride on a baggage carousel in Denver in 2015.

The frontman has also had numerous breakdowns onstage, and once infamously butchered a cover of Nirvana’s “About a Girl,” later admitting that the performance “looked and sounded like total shit.”

Puddle of Mudd released a string of hits in the early 2000s, including “Blurry” (an appropriate song choice for this latest incident), “She Hates Me,” “Drift & Die,” and “Psycho.” Early this year, “Blurry” made Consequence‘s list of the 50 best post-grunge songs.