Even with two men suspected of kidnapping and killing a young DeKalb County couple in custody, police are still looking for people who might have helped them.
“We know that there are those in the community who assisted in harboring this dangerous fugitive over the last few weeks,” Keith Booker of the U.S. Marshal’s Service said in a news release. “We know who you are, and will be coming to arrest you in the near future.”
The marshal’s service and the Birmingham police arrested Richard Augusta “Fathead” Wilson, 41, at Quick Pawn shop trying to pawn a rifle and two other guns Thursday morning.
His alleged partner, Andre Cleveland Gay, 40, was arrested Sept. 25 on multiple counts of kidnapping, murder, felony murder, aggravated assault with intent to commit murder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, jail records show. He is being held without bond.
“These are very violent offenders,” Capt. Paul Guerrucci, head of the Atlanta Police Department’s homicide unit, told reporters Thursday.
Gay and Wilson are accused of kidnapping for ransom Jeronta Brown, 23, and his pregnant girlfriend, Briana Brooks, 21, just steps from the door to their Colleen Court home in DeKalb County on Aug. 30. The two were found shot on Ridge Avenue in northwest Atlanta, 17 miles from where they had been taken. Brown was already dead. Brooks died several days later when she was taken off life support after delivering prematurely their second child.
According to The Birmingham News, a pawn shop clerk became suspicious of Wilson when he tried to pawn an AK-47 and two other guns. He seemed nervous and didn’t have an ID, the newspaper reported.
In the meanwhile, Crime Stoppers had received a tip that Wilson may have been in Birmingham, Guerrucci said.
Family and friends of the victims pooled their money to offer a $20,000 reward in the case.
Even before they became suspects in the deaths of Browns and Brooks in August, the men were tied to other murders.
Gay was paroled in January after spending 22 years in prison for murdering a woman and a baby. Gay was 15 in November 1990 when he shot through the door of an apartment in the McDaniel-Glenn housing project in southwest Atlanta, killing 39-year-old Cathy Dozier and 18-month-old Michael Broughton.
And Wilson was indicted earlier this year on charges he murdered Fikree Muhsin Jordan on Jan. 9. The 37-year-old Jordan was found shot dead in the middle of Farrington Place in southeast Atlanta.
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