 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
NOTE: THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CORRECTED.
THEIR ADRENALINE pumps, their eyes dart back and forth and they inhale short, panicked breaths. With a gun in hand, they try to make a quick escape from the scene of their crime.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, they come face-to-face with a cop. They raise the gun and quickly pull the trigger.
A Philadelphia police officer is dead.
And in that split-second, they become cop-killers.
In the latest slaying of a Philadelphia cop, a massive hunt continues for Eric DeShawn Floyd, the only suspect still being sought in last weekend's slaying of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski.
Experts say that most cop-killers have criminal records - as do alleged cop-killers Floyd and accomplices Levon Warner and Howard Cain - but that's not always the case.
What they share, however, is an impulsive, fatal decision made in the heat of the moment shortly after or in the midst of committing a crime.
Chad Lassiter, adjunct professor for the Graduate School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, is convinced that cop-killers can be easily detected.
Look for people with no hope, he said. "They're walking time bombs."
Philadelphia has endured three fatal cop shootings in two years. All but one of the shooters have long rap sheets.
Floyd, 33; Warner, 39, and Cain, 33, had a history of robbing people. They set out to rob the Bank of America branch inside the ShopRite on Aramingo Avenue Saturday morning, disguised as female Muslims, police allege.
They fled the bank and Liczbinski, responding to a radio call about the robbery, saw the suspects' van and followed it several blocks, to Almond and Schiller streets, in Port Richmond.
Liczbinski, a married father of three who would have turned 40 yesterday, was exiting his cruiser when Cain allegedly fired a Chinese-made SKS assault rifle at him from a short distance away and killed him.
Liczbinski didn't have a chance to fire his gun. Cain was then shot and killed by cops.
"They didn't set out to kill a police officer, they set out to rob a bank," said Dr. Lawrence Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.
He said that the robbers were simply in a "defiant mode" and had the weapons to back them up.
Yesterday, officials traced another gun, a .22-caliber revolver that they'd recovered from the suspects' van, to 19-year-old Levi Swigart, of Duncannon, Pa., who had sold it for drugs in Harrisburg after he stole the revolver from his mother.
The manhunt continues for Floyd, who first entered the system in 1995 when he was convicted of robbery in Lancaster County. He was released four years later.
He was back in prison in 2002 for robbery. He was transferred to many other prisons before being released on parole. In 2007, he was ordered to report to a community corrections center, but failed to do so. He was found and placed back in prison.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We
Oct 8
|
Th
Oct 9 |
Fr
Oct 10 |
Sa
Oct 11 |
Su
Oct 12 |
SPORTS
OBITUARIES
Green
today's poll
express headlines
Promotions
photo GALLERY
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
email this
print this
reprint or license this
