The man wanted for shooting dead a 74-year-old man and posting video of the heinous act to Facebook has committed suicide.
Police in Erie, Pennsylvania say Steve Stephens shot himself while driving into town on Tuesday, around 11:10am.
State Police officers were tailing Stephens’ white Ford Fusion on Buffalo Road, across from an old elementary school, when he killed himself, they said.
The street has been blocked off while police carry out their investigation. Erie is located about 100 miles east of Cleveland, Ohio where Stephens shot dead Robert Godwin on Sunday, in a random act of violence after breaking up with his girlfriend.
On Monday, Cleveland cops said they had expanded their search to five states including Pennsylvania. Stephens’ cell phone pinged in Erie not long after the murder, but it seems that he didn’t travel further after that.
At a Monday press conference, officials said that Stephens could be anywhere in the country, as they offered up a $50,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
Earlier Tuesday, 911 calls were released from the day of the murder, showing how people across the country called in to report the violent Facebook video. Dispatchers answered 300 more calls on Easter than the previous Sunday because of the brutal murder.
Dispatchers say when the first calls started coming in, they weren’t from people near the scene of the crime, but from those who watched the disturbing clip online – some as far away as California, according to Fox 8.
Dispatchers struggled to keep up with the calls, some of which were from people who just wanted to check in to see if the suspect had been caught. ‘Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am, I got about a 100 911 calls about this,’ a dispatcher told one woman who called in.
Meanwhile, former neighbors have spoken out about Stephens’ creepy behavior growing up. Tony Henderson lived across the street from Stephens and his family. When the Stephens family moved to his neighborhood, he says Steve was in his early teens and he was in his late 20s.
When he heard what happened on Sunday, he said he wasn’t surprised because Stephens always seemed ‘out there’.
‘I never quite understood that kid through his entire life, because on some days he would talk to you, and then on others, he would be mean and staring at you and very quiet,’ Henderson told the Daily Beast.
Henderson says he ‘could see something wasn’t right’ with the boy, a feeling that was confirmed when he was invited over to see the teen’s pet bird.
‘He had a parakeet and he had that bird crawl from the cage and onto his finger. Then he slapped the bird as hard as he could with his other hand, and the bird was lying on the floor. The bird looked dead to me. I looked at him and he was smiling and laughing as he looked at me and that bird,’ Henderson recalled.
That lack of empathy is concerning. Science has shown that many rapists and serial murderers tortured animals as children.
‘Hey, animals don’t make you weird like that,’ he added. ‘He was that way before he got that bird. Heard he used to torture other pets he had. He was like that from the time I first met him.’
Stay tuned for further developments.