After manhunt, police capture suspect in spree of killings
COLUMBIA, S.C. » A weeklong manhunt for a suspect wanted in the killings of four people ended without another shot fired Monday morning as hundreds of officers surrounded him in South Carolina, authorities said.
Neither Tyler Terry nor the more than 300 officers searching for him were hurt during his arrest, the Chester County Sheriff’s Office posted on Twitter. The manhunt finally ended after at least three confirmed sightings of Terry since he ran from a wrecked car after firing on Chester County deputies on May 17.
Deputies released photos of Terry’s arrest showing an officer giving him a bottle of a drink as he sat on a pickup tailgate with his hands cuffed behind him. Terry was wearing dirty pants, socks with no shoes and a T-shirt ripped nearly in half.
Investigators didn’t think Terry was getting help from anyone but broke into vehicles — or possibly barns and sheds — and lived off the land. He managed to steal a gun, water, shirt and shoes from an unlocked work truck last week, authorities said.
Terry apparently spent the week in the same small area, eluding dozens of officers who methodically shrunk where they searched and staying out of sight of helicopters that were overhead most of the time, Chester County Sheriff Max Dorsey said.
Terry was hiding in weeds when a team of federal agents spotted him. He had a gun nearby but was grabbed before he could react, Dorsey said.
“He was certainly ready to run. But he was surrounded,” Dorsey said at a Monday news conference.
Terry, 26, is charged with murder in a shooting in York, South Carolina, in early May, the killing in Great Falls of the estranged husband of the woman who drove the car as he fired at officers, and the deaths of two other people in Missouri on May 15 during robberies in the St. Louis suburbs, authorities said. Arrest warrants list Terry’s address as Great Falls.
Sunday afternoon, deputies spotted Terry wearing no shoes and all black clothing crossing a highway. Dorsey said the search paused overnight because authorities were sure Terry was in their perimeter and they didn’t want an encounter in the dark with a possibly armed man that the sheriff said was “extremely fast and agile.”
When the sun rose Monday, the push to find Terry began again and was successful.
“He was tired, thirsty,” Dorsey said. “He’s all cut up. He’s got bug bites. His clothes are torn. He’s exhausted.”
The search grew from about 100 officers last week to 300 officers Monday. The seven-day manhunt in the same area for a suspect is one of the longest in recent memory in South Carolina.
“He’s been homeless for some time and may have spent long periods of time living in the woods. I’m not saying he is Superman, but that could help explain some things,” Chester County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Grant Suskin said,
The woman driving Terry was arrested after wrecking the car. Adrienne Simpson, 34, is charged along with Terry with killing Eugene Simpson, from whom she had been separated for several years. An arrest warrant said she confessed that both she and Terry shot the father of her children and that she helped dump his body in a ditch.
Monday, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell charged Terry and Simpson with two counts of first-degree murder and 12 other counts in the deaths of Barbara Goodkin, 71, and Sergei Zacharev, 58.
Investigators said Zacharev was shot Saturday night during a robbery in a restaurant parking lot in the St. Louis suburb of Brentwood and Goodkin was shot about 45 minutes later as she sat in her car in University City. The charges allege Goodkin’s husband, Stanley Goodkin, also was shot and his cellphone saved his life.
Bell said Terry and Simpson also are charged in a previously unreported shooting. A motorist, whose name was not released, reported being shot at 10 times while he was driving on Highway 170 in the St. Louis area on May 15. Three bullets hit his car, but he was not injured.