Jeremy Anderson Baton Rouge, Louisiana man arrested in connection to string of homeless people slayings. Motive unknown.
A Louisiana man has been arrested in connection with the murders of three homeless people in Baton Rouge, police announced Thursday.
Jeremy Anderson, 29, was arrested without incident late Wednesday on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder, Baton Rouge Police Chief Murphy Paul said during a press conference.
Anderson, of Baton Rouge, was taken into custody after a search warrant was executed at his home, where evidence found inside linked him to the slayings, which took place on three different occasions, Paul said.
Anderson later made incriminating statements that placed him at the crime scenes, the chief said.
Paul announced Friday that detectives believed the killings of three homeless people since Dec. 13 were related, although a definitive link had yet to be found at the time.
Tony Williams, a 50 year old ‘transient’ was found fatally shot on a porch of a vacant home on Friday, roughly two blocks away from where other homeless people, Christina Fowler, 53, and Gregory Corcoran, 40, were found dead with gunshot wounds two weeks earlier, police said.
The Chief said no evidence existed showing that anyone else was involved in the slayings.
Of note, Chief Paul did not provide an alleged motive in the three killings. Unclear was whether Anderson knew his victims, and how he came to target his particular victims.
‘Why would anyone target someone who’s vulnerable and homeless.’
The killings in recent weeks had placed the city’s homeless population on edge.
Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome said tips from the public to police investigators showed the community’s ‘commitment to fight back against crime.’
‘The case is particularly tragic as the victims were part of a community that is often overlooked and vulnerable,’ Broome reiterated.
Reflected, Michael Acaldo, director of the city’s largest homeless shelter, St. Vincent de Paul in recent days, ‘Why would anyone target someone who’s vulnerable and homeless.’
Acaldo in recent weeks had increasingly opened his shelter’s doors to stave off the risk of homeless people sleeping in the open and vulnerable to potential attacks WAFB9 reports.
How Being Homeless in America became an increasing reality and vulnerable existence:
Many attacks against the homeless go unreported, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, making the frequency of violence against poor people difficult to properly quantify. However, as homelessness has steadily increased in many major cities across the country in recent years, advocates and police have expressed concerns that unsheltered people are easy targets.
While violent crime has plunged in recent decades, data show a slight uptick in homeless homicide victims in cities like Los Angeles, according to NPR.
Census stats for 2016 showed an estimated 550K individuals homeless in the United States. That number is thought to have precipitously gone up in recent years as cities across America struggle to find a way to house them and ‘make them out of sight’.
Critics in recent years claim ‘tough measures’ to address homelessness doing very little to address underlying reasons of transient existence in the US, particularly the nation’s affordable housing crisis, as cost or rental in major cities continues to sky rocket as one segment of society continue to flourish almost to the detriment to those unable to keep pace as seen in San Francisco’s tech sector boom where Lamborghini’s are a dime a dozen along with vinyl tent enclaves housing the destitute.
Other factors include volatile unemployment (supplanted by the gig economy and employer’s non committal in hiring full time workers) along with a lack of services to treat mental illness and substance abuse. Also factoring concern are citizen’s general antipathy towards homelessness as reflected by local government’s desire to appease its well off constituents appalled at the stench of ‘gutter living.’
$1k fine or 6 months jail: Las Vegas will punish you for being poor and destitute.
