A 19-year-old student suspected of fatally shooting his parents at a Central Michigan University dormitory was arrested early Saturday.
James Eric Davis Jr. was arrested without incident shortly after midnight following an intensive daylong search that included more than 100 police officers, some heavily armed in camouflage uniforms, authorities said.
Authorities found him after someone aboard a train spotted a person along railroad tracks in Mount Pleasant, and called police, University police Chief Bill Yeagley said.
Yeagley said Davis Jr. was under guard at a hospital Saturday and would be moved to the Isabella County jail when he's discharged.
The suspect in the shooting incident that happened on CMU's campus is now in custody. Get more details at https://t.co/9LfrVQwM0i.
— @CMUniversity
The student had been acting so strangely the day before the alleged killings that campus police talked to his mother Diva Davis and then took him to a hospital for suspected drug abuse, authorities said Saturday.
Yeagley told reporters that Davis Jr.'s parents had just picked him up from that hospital and brought him to his dorm to pack up for spring break when Friday's shooting happened. He said the gun used in the shooting belonged to Davis's father, James Davis Sr., a part-time police officer in the Chicago suburb of Bellwood.
Yeagley would not say whether the father had brought the gun to the university's campus in Mount Pleasant, Mich., when picking up his son, but he noted that Davis Jr. can be seen on video in the dorm's parking lot with the gun before he entered the residence hall where his parents were shot around 8:30 a.m. ET.
The university is considered a gun-free zone, and Yeagley said it would have been a violation of campus policy for Davis Sr. to bring a gun on campus.
"We can make a lot of assumptions, but I'm not going to make those assumptions. But I can tell you for sure that the gun came from outside, in the parking lot, with (Davis Jr.) through the building," Yeagley said.
Yeagley would not say what type of gun was used or whether it was Davis Sr.'s service revolver.
He also declined to say whether drugs were found in Davis Jr.'s system.
'Packing up for spring break'
Mount Pleasant is about a 460-kilometre drive from the family's hometown of Plainfield, Ill. The shooting occurred on a day when parents were arriving to pick up students at the university for the beginning of a week-long spring break.
Yeagley said witness statements and video indicate that at the time they were shot, Davis Jr.'s parents were in the dorm "simply packing up for spring break."
He said police had first come into contact with Davis Jr. on Thursday morning when he came running into a community police officer's office in his dorm "very frightened," but "not making a lot of sense."
"He said someone was out to hurt him, someone was going to harm him, and the officer calmed him down and tried to gain more information about what was going on.… Mr. Davis was very vague and he kept talking about someone having a gun," Yeagley said, adding that Davis Jr. said he had not actually seen the person with a gun.
"We said, `How do you know he was going to hurt you if you didn't see a gun?' He was saying things like, `It's just a feeling. I know it,"' the chief said.
Wasn't making sense
Davis Jr. eventually talked about riding in a dorm elevator with the person, and police went to talk to the individual Davis Jr. had identified. Yeagley said that when officers determined that the person posed no threat — and reviewed video from the elevator that showed Davis Jr. and that person laughing — Davis Jr. said he was fine and was leaving campus Friday for spring break.
The shooting at Central Michigan University today strikes close to home. A sad day in Bellwood and across the 7th District. My sincerest condolences go out to the family of Bellwood Police Officer James Davis Sr. and his wife who were shot and killed this morning. May they RIP. pic.twitter.com/B0cykAxFVv
— @RepChrisWelch
Hours later, officers spotted Davis Jr. in a dorm hallway with his suitcases, Yeagley said. When officers tried to talk to him, he again wasn't making sense, Yeagley said. They asked Davis Jr. to call his parents, which he did. An officer then spoke to Davis's mother, told her about her son's behaviour, their concerns about possible drug use and asked her whether he had a history of drug use, Yeagley said.
"The mother said she too was concerned this could be drugs," he said.
Yeagley said Davis Jr. had not been previously identified by campus officials as someone that others on campus were concerned about.
"Mr. Davis was not ever reported, and we had no interaction that we're aware of with him in any negative fashion — with anybody — prior to this incident," he said.
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