A man, actively wanted by police in New York and Washington for a series of nightly attacks on sleeping homeless people, was arrested before dawn on Tuesday in the US federal capital.
“Arrested”: the Washington police announced in a laconic tweet the end of a run that aroused anxiety among those who, by the thousands, sleep on the streets of major American cities.
The man, suspected of having killed two homeless people and injured three others by shooting at them while they slept, “is currently being questioned”, said the police, promising more details.
According to American media, which rely on anonymous police sources, it is Gerald Brevard III, a 30-year-old man suffering from psychiatric disorders and having several frauds and assaults on his criminal record.
“He has suffered from mental illness for a long time and has been institutionalized several times,” his father, Gerald Brevard Jr., told the newspaper. The Daily Beast. “But I never thought he would turn violent,” he said.
New York Mayor Eric Adams welcomed the arrest of this “ruthless killer”. “Those living on the streets can breathe a sigh of relief,” he added in a joint statement with his counterpart in Washington, Muriel Bowser.
“We know this experience has been truly frightening for our homeless people and we will continue to work to ensure safe and affordable housing for all of our residents,” she added.
The day before, the two elected Democrats had shown their determination to put the killer out of harm’s way during a rare joint press conference.
Those living on the streets can breathe a sigh of relief
Offering thousands of dollars in rewards, they called on the public to help police identify the suspect, several images of which were captured by surveillance cameras.
These photos, sometimes clear enough to distinguish his face, show a bearded man, thin and rather young, with a shaved head.
Bundled up
He is suspected of having carried out five attacks using the same modus operandi. The first two took place on March 3 and 8 in the northeast of the American capital. The victims, who were shot, survived.
On Wednesday March 9, still in Washington, the emergency services intervened because the tent of a homeless person was on fire. Inside they found the body of a deceased man. The autopsy showed that he had succumbed to multiple gunshots and stab wounds.
According to investigators, the killer then traveled to New York, about 400 km to the north.
Early Saturday morning, a 38-year-old man was found shot but alive in lower Manhattan.
In the late afternoon, the police found another man in the same neighborhood, this time dead, with head and neck injuries. According to CCTV footage, he was killed around 6 a.m.
In this video, we see a man dressed in black, a hood on his head and wearing blue gloves. He circles around a homeless man wrapped in a yellow sleeping bag, gives him little kicks to check that he is sleeping, takes a look around, before shooting.
It was by seeing these images on social networks that a Washington police investigator made the link between the two series of attacks.
Thousands of people sleep on the streets of New York every night, several hundred in Washington, and their management is not without problems.
In February, after the death of a woman pushed onto the subway tracks by a homeless man suffering from psychiatric disorders, the mayor of New York announced a plan to dislodge those who settle in the gigantic underground network of the subway.
His response had been criticized by homelessness associations, as had the dismantling of camps in public parks in Washington.