Police say man used father’s gun in fatal shootings
A 19-year-old student suspected of fatally shooting his parents at a Central Michigan University dormitory had been acting so strangely the day before the killings that campus police talked to his mother and then took him to a hospital for suspected drug abuse, authorities said Saturday.
University Police Chief Bill Yeagley said James Eric 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’ 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. 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.
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. Davis Jr. was arrested without incident shortly past midnight after an intensive daylong search that included more than 100 police officers, some heavily armed in camouflage uniforms, authorities said. He was found after someone aboard a train spotted a person along railroad tracks in Mount Pleasant and called police, 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. He has been charged with murder.
Yeagley said police had first come into contact with Davis Jr. on Thursday morning when he came running into a community police office in his dorm “very frightened” and “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.