The suspect in Tuesday morning's incident that prompted campus police to fire two shots turned himself in to the Henrico County jail Tuesday night, following a day-long search.
According to information released by the university, Connor T. O'Leary turned himself in around 8:15 Tuesday night. O'Leary had been able to elude campus police, who fired two shots at O'Leary's vehicle, and Henrico County Police earlier Tuesday.
O'Leary, who is not associated with the school, was sitting in a forest green SUV around 4 a.m. in the 1700 block of the University Forest Apartments when campus police approached him. Initially, they asked him why he parked his vehicle on the grass when they smelled marijuana.
"[The police] kept asking him questions about marijuana and he kept denying it," said senior Kiki Grainger, who said she saw the whole incident through her open second-story window in her apartment at 1707. "[The officer] was like, 'I smell that, why do I smell that?' And then the guy was like, 'Oh, it's my golf shoes. I play a lot of golf. I know that's weird but that's my golf shoes.'"
Grainger said that when the police asked O'Leary to produce his shoes, he was unable. Police kept asking him about marijuana for about 30 minutes when they spotted a bag under his right elbow near the center console, Grainger said.
O'Leary initially stalled by picking up other things around him, but police kept asking for the bag near his elbow, Grainger said.
"The guy picked it up and at that point, the policeman was shining his light through the passenger's side and was like, 'Sir, that's marijuana,'" Grainger said. "He walked around the front of the car to go talk to the kid in the driver's seat."
At that point, O'Leary put his car, which had been idling on the grass facing the parking lot, into drive, Grainger said. She said that two other policemen warned him not to drive away before he drove away.
An officer fired two shots at O'Leary, one of them hitting a police car, though Grainger did not see them because her roommate had yelled at her to get her head down. Original reports said that O'Leary had fired the shots and Grainger said that investigaters this morning told her that O'Leary had fired the shots.
"It literally sounded like a cap gun or a .22 short," Grainger said. "It was not a .44 mag. It was a really wimpy gun. That's why I was like, 'Is it a police man doing something with tires?' Like, I don't know what it was. It was not a powerful gun at all."
After getting away from campus police, O'Leary was then chased by Henrico Police when he abandoned the SUV near Towawna Drive. Owens said O'Leary left the car and got away by foot.
"There was a track by canine as well as multiple officers searching the area," Owens said by phone. "He has not been located at this point."
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Owens added that the search was not ongoing as of 11 a.m. after police lost his track.
Owens described O'Leary as a white male with brown hair and wearing a carolina-blue sweatshirt and dark pants. According to information released by the university, he is 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds.
The SUV that O'Leary was initially in was reported as stolen by On-Star to Henrico Police. When it arrived on campus, Henrico Police allowed campus police to deal with the situation. Only when the vehicle left campus did Henrico Police start to chase it.
A campus alert text was sent out to students at 6 a.m., alerting them of the situation. No injuries were reported and the university said there was no current threat to students.
University spokesman Brian Eckert said that the delay for the text was due to campus police's judgement.
He said that the police would have sent out a message earlier in the day had they determined there was an immediate threat to students.
An arrest warrant was obtained by campus police shortly before 1 p.m. Tuesday.
Eckert could not remember the last time shots were fired on campus. The closest thing to this, he said, happened in May 2007 during the gap between finals and commencement, when a library employee noticed someone walking out of the library with a firearm in a hip holster.
The school was shut down and when the suspect was found, police discovered that it was a pellet gun.
Some students around the 1700 block, who only heard the gun shots but did not see the incident, said they were shaken by the incident. Grainger said that she had a different perspective after seeing everything.
"If I had woken up to two random gun shots like some people had, I would have been like, 'What in the world? I don't understand'," Grainger said. "It would have pieced together differently... But I got to watch like some dumbass hotboxing in his car and then fleeing from the police."
Contact staff writer Andrew Prezioso at andrew.prezioso@richmond.edu
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