“This has been an incredibly difficult 72 hours,” Auburn head coach Gene Chizik said earlier today in his first press conference since this weekend’s shooting that claimed the lives of two former players and wounded others.
The grief that Chizik and the Auburn community continue to share will not go away overnight, but perhaps now they will feel some sense of relief. Not 10 minutes after I posted Chizik’s comments, news regarding the third suspect connected to the shooting came across the wire.
WSFA reports that Desmonte Leonard, facing three counts of murder and two counts of assault, turned himself into authorities earlier this evening at the Montgomery Federal Courthouse. A law enforcement official told the Associated Press that police had arrested a man in connection to the shootings.
Local police were already reportedly prepared to hold a press conference at a little after 9 p.m. CT.
Leonard’s arrest comes one day after Montgomery police staged what would ultimately be a fruitless “standoff” at a home where Leonard was believed to be hiding. In the end, the location “turned out not to be correct,” FBI spokesman Douglas Astralaga told Reuters.
Two others were arrested yesterday in connection to the shootings, which claimed the lives of former Auburn players Ed Christian and Ladarious Phillips, as well as 20-year-old Demario Pitts. Wounded in the shootings were Auburn lineman Eric Mack, Xavier Moss and John Robertson.