Correction appended

Three meth users caused a Walmart in Vancouver to lockdown briefly on Black Friday after one of them flew off the handle and took his two friends hostage, according to reports.

The trio was getting high inside a stolen car in the parking lot of the Northeast Highway 99 store when driver Justin Eugene Short, 28, grew paranoid and claimed he was missing drugs and money, the Clark County Sheriff's Office said.

Enraged, Short decided to take his two passengers, a man and a woman, hostage, the sheriff's office said. After a while, the three occupants discovered that the battery of their car was dead, according to KATU News.

So Short sent the male captive into Walmart to steal a pair of jumper cables. The friend instead told store employees to call 911 because there was a hostage situation in the parking lot, authorities said.

Sheriff's deputies arrived around 11:15 a.m. in an armored vehicle, which spooked Short and the woman, according to KATU. The two bolted from the stolen car and Short rushed into the Walmart, prompting the lockdown.

Short later ran out of the store, scaled a freeway fence along Interstate 5 and eventually ended up hiding behind an RV parked on the 900 block of 86th Street, the sheriff's office said. He was taken into custody a short time later.

Deputies also detained the woman, authorities said. She claimed not to know her name at the time of her arrest, according to reports.

Authorities recovered two firearms from the stolen vehicle, the sheriff's office said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story, citing the Clark County Sheriff's Office, reported the name of the suspect as Justin Eugene Godsy and included several booking photos of the man from prior arrests in Oregon. The sheriff's office later said the suspect was, in fact, Justin Eugene Short, who has used Godsy's name as an alias in the past.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

skavanaugh@oregonian.com

503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaugh