Facebook Killer Kills Himself Surrounded by Police Tragedy Comes to a Close
Steve Stephens took his own life after going through a McDonald’s drive through and authorities were alerted to his whereabouts. Police pursued him, disabled his vehicle, and Stephens shot himself in the head with presumably the same weapon he used to murder Robert Godwin.
A frantic caller tried to describe a gruesome scene on Easter Sunday in East Cleveland, where 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. was lying on the pavement in a pool of his own blood. He had been gunned down by a stranger, for a reason that no one might ever understand.
It was about 2 p.m. Sunday when Godwin was fatally shot by a man half his age. Police said Steve W. Stephens, 37, had rolled down Cleveland’s East 93rd Street in a white Ford Fusion, asked Godwin to say a woman’s name and then raised his gun and pulled the trigger — a fatal encounter that was captured on a horrifying video that was soon uploaded to Facebook.The chilling crime led local, state and federal law enforcement officers on an exhaustive 45-hour manhunt that quickly swelled from a citywide tragedy to a nationwide concern, as authorities warned residents in five states to be “on alert” as they announced publicly that they had no idea where the armed and dangerous suspect might be.
The coldblooded killing — which reignited a debate about violence in the Internet age — ended Tuesday morning, about 100 miles away in rural Pennsylvania, where state troopers trapped Stephens, who then shot and killed himself, authorities said.
For nearly 48 hours, Stephens seemingly vanished from sight — a development so baffling that authorities had begun to speculate that he had died.
That changed just after 11 a.m. Tuesday when Stephens reportedly pulled the white Ford Fusion into the first drive-through window of a McDonald’s on Buffalo Road in Harborcreek Township, a suburb of Erie, Pa.
Thomas DuCharme Jr., the franchise’s owner and operator, told the Erie Times News that workers were preparing the restaurant for lunch when an employee manning the back drive-through window said she thought she’d spotted one of the most wanted men in America ordering a meal a few feet away.
“She called me to the back,” DuCharme said. “She wanted to make sure that I took a look to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, and at that point she was already on the phone calling the police.”
“He got to the second window of the drive-through,” he added. “We told him he was waiting on his fries for a minute just to kind of buy some time for the cops if it actually was him. He said he had no time to wait, he had to go.”
Instead of waiting for his fries, Stephens retrieved his 20-piece chicken nugget meal, turned his vehicle onto Buffalo road and drove away.
“I am pretty sure he figured out that we were on to him,” DuCharme said. “He didn’t want to wait for his fries.”
Maj. William Teper Jr., a Pennsylvania State Police commander, told reporters Tuesday afternoon that “a concerned citizen” tipped police off about Stephens’s whereabouts at 11:10 a.m. He declined to confirm that the caller was an employee at McDonald’s.
Multiple state troopers descended on the area near Buffalo Road, where the phone call originated, and eventually spotted Stephens in his car, Teper said.
The troopers began pursuing Stephens in marked patrol cars. The chase was brief, covering two miles and never exceeding 50 mph.
Near the two-mile mark, Teper said, as Stephens neared an abandoned school, one of the pursuing troopers decided to initiate “a pit maneuver,” a technique used by law enforcement to turn a fleeing vehicle sideways, causing the driver to lose control or come to a stop.
“The vehicle spun around — came to a stop,” Teper said. “He immediately pulled a weapon out and shot himself in the car.”
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
