A Long Island man has been arrested for killing his one-time love interest and her 2-year-old son, whose little body was found in a freezer, police said.
Jerry Lewis, 24, repeatedly stabbed Shakeela Planter, 21, on the morning of Dec. 18 inside the North Bay Shore apartment they had been sharing, police said.
Lewis did not spare Planter’s son, Jaiden Planter, police said. He beat the toddler, stuffed his body into a plastic bag and stashed him in his mother’s freezer, police said.
“The baby was viciously beaten,” said Suffolk County Police Detective Lt. Gerard Pelkofsky. “No one reported hearing anything at all.”
Lewis fled the residence in Planter’s SUV and visited his sister in New Jersey, police said.
He eventually abandoned the vehicle at a mall in Riverhead, L.I., and took a train to his mother’s home in Laurel, Md., police said.
Five days after the killings, after Planter had failed to show up for her job as a dietician at Huntington Hospital, her landlord found her bound and wrapped body on her bed.
Police arrested Lewis, who does not have a criminal record, in Maryland on Christmas. He was expected to be extradited to Suffolk County to face murder charges, police said.
Planter and Lewis, who was not Jaiden’s father, were once a couple, police said. He had been staying with her since September, but it was not clear if they had resumed
a romantic relationship.
“He was helping out in the house,” Pelkofsky said. “He was baby-sitting for Jaiden.”
Pelkofsky said the level of violence in the case shocked authorities. “People in the morgue had tears in their eyes — and they deal with death all the time,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment