Tip leads to capture of third suspect in police killing

Associated Press

May 08, 2008 11:50 am

— PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Police acting on a tip closed in on an abandoned Southwest Philadelphia row house late Wednesday night and captured the third suspect in the death of a police officer shot in a weekend confrontation with bank robbery suspects.
Eric Floyd, 33, and a woman identified as his girlfriend were taken into custody in a second-floor bedroom of the dilapidated house with boarded up windows shortly after 11 p.m. Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said Floyd was unarmed and did not resist.
Mayor Michael Nutter told a news conference early Thursday he had confronted the suspect as he arrived in a van at police headquarters and voiced disappointment “as one African-American male to another.”
Floyd arrived locked in the handcuffs of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, the 12-year veteran and married father of three who was killed with an assault weapon Saturday, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey said.
“It’s a way of just paying tribute to the slain officer,” Ramsey said.
Police had pursued a flood of tips for days in an intensive manhunt for the last suspect remaining at large, and Nutter said Liczbinski’s wife, Michelle, was “very pleased” at news of the capture.
“We cannot bring Stephen back but we can certainly bring some closure to this entire matter,” the mayor said.
Nutter said he was two feet away as Floyd was taken from the van. “I had to look in the face of a guy who would do something like that, and quite frankly as one African-American male to another, just tell him how disappointed I was in what he had done,” he said.
“I looked him dead in his eye and said, ‘I’m disappointed in you.’ And then I asked the officers to take him away,” Nutter said. “He had no reaction. He was caught.”
One suspect, Howard Cain, 33, had been shot to death by police Saturday during a chase after the robbery. Another, Levon Warner, 38, was arrested and charged Sunday with murder, robbery, conspiracy and related offenses.
Officials said earlier a reward for information leading to the arrest of Floyd had grown to $150,000. Ramsey said Thursday he didn’t know yet who might receive reward money.
Nutter and other officials had urged Floyd to turn himself in and warned that anyone who helped him also would be prosecuted.
Liczbinski, who would have turned 40 Tuesday, was shot responding to the robbery in northeast Philadelphia around 11:45 a.m. Saturday. The suspects opened fire after Liczbinski confronted them a short distance away, shooting the officer at least five times, police said.
Officials have announced a memorial fund for his family.