Police arrested A “person of interest” Four Oklahoma bicyclists were killed in central Florida — more than 1,200 miles away, authorities said Tuesday.
Joseph Kennedy, 67, was arrested Monday in Daytona Beach Shores in a car “reported stolen by the Okmulgee County Sheriff’s Office.” According to a report from police in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.
Marc Chastain, 32, Billie Chastain, 30, Mike Sparks, 32, and Alex Stevens, 29She was reported missing last week, and her bodies were found shot and dismembered in the Deep Fork River days later. Okmulgee police said.
After naming Kennedy a “person of interest” Monday afternoon, the man’s blue Chrysler PT Cruiser was found “abandoned behind a business” in Morris, police said.
Daytona Beach Shores Director of Public Safety Michael Fowler said a police license plate reader that spotted Kennedy’s vehicle listed the car as stolen and the driver “missing” while Kennedy was driving near the 2800 block of South Atlantic Avenue around 8:30 a.m. Tuesday. .
According to Fowler, Kennedy was arrested without incident and did not make a statement to authorities.
“Once (police in Oklahoma) confirmed her missing person status, we were notified that she was a person of interest in a quadruple homicide,” Fowler said.
Kennedy, who has a listed address in Okmulgee, is being held without bail. He was booked into the Volusia County Branch Jail at 10:21 a.m. Tuesday on a charge of grand theft of a motor vehicle, according to Department of Corrections records.
Police in Oklahoma said Kennedy was also charged in connection with a 2012 shooting in Okmulgee.
The report did not name Kennedy as a suspect in the deaths of the four bicyclists.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday afternoon whether Kennedy had appointed or had appointed an attorney.
Kennedy got on the radar of investigators, who searched his scrap yard and found evidence of a “violent incident” on “adjacent property,” Okmulgee Police Chief Joe Prentice said.
Kennedy was initially interviewed by Okmulgee police on Friday, according to Prentice, before he apparently left the state.
The four people who were traveling in the two-wheeler went missing earlier last week.
Prentice later said the men planned to pull off an undisclosed crime.
Investigators based their belief on the word of a witness who was called along when the men planned to “hit a lick good enough for everybody,” Prentiss said, using slang for a lucrative criminal activity.
Polly DeFrank Contributed.
