Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto joined Newell on his program today, just under 24 hours after he had given a remarkable press conference where the public finally learned all there is to know about alleged killer Sean Barrette, a 22-year-old man who was already a suspect in four murders in Jefferson and Orleans Parish; authorities believe Barrette was involved in three additional crimes that fortunately did not become more homicides."This guy wasn't going to stop, for some reason he decided he was going to continuously ride around and shoot people," Lopinto began. "We had a female on I-10 around Bonnabel whose vehicle was shot up around that time and she actually thought it was hail hitting her vehicle and continued to just drive to her house. So when she arrived at her house in New Orleans, she noticed bullet holes in her vehicle. They contacted NOPD and we started investigating that as aggravated criminal damage to property."Continuing, Lopinto said "We have since this morning been able to link up the projectiles in that case to match the murder weapon [in Jefferson] so that happened three hours before our first murder in Jefferson Parish, which was approximately a week and half before the first murder that happened in Orleans... this guy was, without a doubt, on a rampage."Newell asked if this strengthens what Lopinto said originally about these attacks being random.
"Without a doubt," he confirmed. "We haven't received any information by any means that connects this victim with the suspect... it appears that they were completely random, which makes it all the more scary, to be honest with you.""Chilling!" Newell replied.
"It is," Lopinto agreed. "Think of that what-ifs! If you don't have the cameras we have in place, if we don't get the break of finding [Barrette's] cell phone... we need to leverage our technology to make sure the bits and pieces of information we get allow us to track somebody down very quickly, and we are lucky we have been able to do that."
