A lot can happen in a decade.
But for Kirk Mitchell, time caught up with him.
Mitchell, 42, was wanted in a California shooting at an underground parking garage that left 65-year-old Louis Charles Mingo dead. Mitchell had been on the run since 2007 until Conyers police found him and Brian Simpson, a man wanted in a separate murder in Alabama, outside a Motel 6 last month.
It all started with a whiff of marijuana.
Conyers Officer Kelli Behrend was on her routine patrol June 30 when she saw a car with fogged windows in the Motel 6 parking lot on the 1300 block of Dogwood Drive, police spokeswoman Kim Lucas said in a news release.
The two men — Simpson, who police said “immediately smelled (like) marijuana,” and Mitchell — were seated in the car when Behrend gave them commands that were ignored, Lucas said. Police said Simpson, 38, of Huntsville, Ala., got out of the car and went inside a room at the motel.
There, officers found two women in the room and Simpson hiding in a bathroom, Lucas said.
Police searched the room and found three quart-sized bags containing 100 tablets of ecstasy. Other narcotics, marijuana and a gun were also found in the car, Lucas said. Police later discovered the gun had been stolen out of Winder in 2008. Police did not say who stole the gun.
Mitchell and Simpson were initially arrested on drug, weapons and suspicion of providing a false name charges.
But once the men were fingerprinted, Lucas said officials discovered they were wanted in two separate murders a decade apart on opposite sides of the country. How the two met and their relationship to each other is not known.
Simpson faces murder, attempted murder and first-degree assault charges after Huntsville police said he was involved in a May triple shooting that killed Ladarius Turner and injured two others.
Conyers police did not say if the men have been extradited, but Mitchell and Simpson do not appear in the respective county jail records where the alleged crimes were committed.
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