An Arizona SWAT team descended on a Walmart in Glendale yesterday and busted the bearded young man shown in the mugshot below for the “first four” sniper attacks on Interstate-10.
Although they announced their arrest with the jubilant tweet “we got him” there’s actually been about a dozen highway shootings in the past three weeks, which leaves the majority still unexplained.
The father of the suspected gunman called the police “morons” for arresting his son, and in turn accused them of trying to resolve a high-profile crime spree at an innocent youth’s expense.
“He has way too much value for human life to even take the slightest or remotest risk of actually injuring someone,” he said.
Coincidentally, no one has been killed or even seriously harmed in any of the serial freeway shootings for which 21-year-old Leslie Allen Merritt has, in part, been charged this weekend.
Investigators assert that his firearm was “forensically linked” to the first few attacks, and that they believe the rest were likely “copycats.”
"I believe we have some copycats that decided to participate," a Public Safety spokesman told reporters last night.
Since the spate of apparently random attacks began on I-10 on August 29th, many motorists have been avoiding the interstate altogether.
Now -- with an unknown number of armed imitators still at large -- they’ll probably continue using alternate routes.
