HOURS after being charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the stray-bullet killing of a Chester woman, 17-year-old Abdul Johnson stole a vehicle from detectives - while handcuffed - and drove away from the prison that was to become his home, law-enforcement sources said.
Police from numerous agencies pursued Johnson as he drove the undercover car back into Chester, where he eventually crashed it into the porch of a house at 6th Street and Highland Avenue, the sources said.
He was immediately taken back into custody by state police.
It's unclear how Johnson, of Curry Street near Johnson, Chester, commandeered the vehicle.
Sources said that detectives from the Delaware County District Attorney's criminal-investigation division drove Johnson to the prison about 4:30 p.m.
They had left the car at either the guard house or the main gate to secure their weapons when Johnson jumped from the rear seat to the driver's seat and sped off while handcuffed, a source said.
The feat should be impossible, as protocol deems that a prisoner be handcuffed behind the back or should have the cuffs tightly secured to a belly strap around his waist, several sources said.
Now, Johnson can add theft to the litany of charges, including the murder, that were announced against him and his alleged co-conspirator, Dominique Smith, 19, yesterday in connection with the death of Kathy Ann Stewart.
A mother of three and grandmother of four, Stewart, 49, was killed by a stray bullet that pierced the wall of her mother's Chester home and struck her in the head as she lay on a bed talking on the phone about 8:45 p.m. Sunday.
Stewart was staying at the house, on Franklin Street near 3rd, as she so often did to take care of her cancer-stricken mother, 85-year-old Marietta Andrews.
Yesterday, Andrews, thin and frail in her pajamas and teal bathrobe, listened with her hand over her mouth from the second-story window of her home as District Attorney G. Michael Green held a news conference on the street below, announcing the arrests of Johnson and Smith.
He said the shooting that claimed Stewart's life had been over a "beef" that Smith and Johnson had with a man who allegedly had shot their friend in the eye.
Stewart's relatives said yesterday that the unidentified man Smith and Johnson were after that night had run into the house next door and that the teens just started shooting at both houses.
One relative said that it was young people in the community who let other young people in the family know who was responsible for the shooting.
According to court documents, one witness with the courage to come forward told police that Smith and Johnson had confessed their roles in the slaying.
The details of the confession to that witness, as related by D.A. Green, were too much to bear for some of the 100 friends and relatives gathered at the news conference.
When Eric Washington, 38, Stewart's nephew, heard that Smith and Johnson had allegedly laughed about the murder, he broke down in sobs that rang out over Green's news conference and the planes overhead.
"It's so hurtful it's overwhelming," Washington later said. "How could they laugh?"
During the news conference, city residents asked as many questions as reporters did, wondering if the district attorney would seek the death penalty (too early to comment, according to Green) and why there weren't cops patrolling the streets that night ("There aren't enough officers to have one on all corners," he said).
Stewart's sister Sunday Hollman publicly expressed to investigators her appreciation and initial doubt.
"I hate to say it, but I didn't think you were going to do it," she said.
Out of the eye of cameras, Vinnie Washington, another of Stewart's nephews, said that there have been many lives lost in Chester but that because of the nature of this death, people finally had the courage to come forward.
He wished, even amid his own pain, that justice had happened for the families who came before his and that it will happen for the families that will inevitably come after.
"Their families are torn apart, too," he said, adding that the sad list now includes Smith's and Johnson's families as well.
"They are somebody's children, nephews and sons too."
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