Sort of. Snopes has this to say:
Funny stories are often presented as articles that ran as news items because some find "wacky news" tales far more appealing than they do plain unvarnished jokes. The "false but authoritative-looking attribution" is a common device in such mailings, one the savvy Internet user learns to watch out for.

Could this story have happened anyway? Since we penned this article in April 2002, the major elements of the Internet forward have come true at least once. In September 2003 a minister in Odessa, Texas, who felt police were not responding quickly enough to his call about a burgled church 40 minutes later followed up with a second phone call in which he reported he was holding hostages and threatening to kill them at that location.