Police arrest suspect in shootings
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on January 10, 2016 1:45 AM
Less than 24 hours after meetings were held to discuss increasing police patrols in the neighborhood of District 3 council member Mark Stevens, the Goldsboro Police Department made an arrest in the Herman Street neighborhood Thursday night related to a shooting that occurred in Lincoln Homes that same evening.
Police officers arrested Jabar Lee Leslie Jr., 1438 Garner Chapel Road, Mount Olive, at 109 N. Herman St. and charged the 18-year-old with possession of a weapon of mass destruction, and transporting a weapon of mass destruction.
He was subsequently placed under a $10,000 secured bond in the Wayne County Jail.
During the night on Thursday, GPD officers and deputies from the Wayne County Sheriff's Office were conducting a saturation patrol in order to deter crime in the area of North Herman Street.
"I was out there with the officers and we started working that area from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.," said Goldsboro Police Chief Mike West. "While we were out there, we were talking with an individual that just happened to be walking the area, and that was one of the purposes of being out there -- just people walking through the area just to make contact with them, to talk with them and go from there. We were speaking with one individual when we heard shots fired south of our location, which would have placed the shots over towards Lincoln Homes."
Following the shots being fired, officers were dispatched to the location of the incident and recovered multiple spent pistol and shotgun rounds in the area.
About 10 to 15 minutes after the incident, a man was riding his bicycle up Evergreen Avenue toward the location of GPD officers. Several officers stopped the man to speak with him, and the man told officers that someone had been shooting at him while he was riding along Audubon Avenue.
"He ended up being the victim of the first shots-fired call that we heard. While we were talking with him, we're getting the description of the vehicle from him and then we heard additional shots fired back over towards the same area of South Audubon Avenue, Elm Street, Lincoln Homes area," West said.
The description of the vehicle the man gave GPD officers led to the arrest of Leslie only 15 to 20 minutes later.
Following the officer speaking with the man on the bicycle, officers witnessed the vehicle -- a 2012 Ford Fusion, four door, red, with North Carolina license plate number CKJ-9063 -- pull into the driveway of 109 N. Herman St., only several houses down from the residence of council member Stevens.
"Maybe 15 or 20 minutes after we finished talking to the victim is when we noticed the vehicle matching the description had come up Herman Street from Ash Street, and cut its lights off as it came into the 100 block of North Herman Street and pulled into the driveway at the residence," West said.
Upon walking over to the vehicle and checking it, officers could see a shotgun inside the vehicle. The officers then secured a search warrant for the vehicle.
After serving the search warrant, officers located a Mossberg shotgun that had been sawed off to an illegal length. This weapon was loaded with shotgun shells, and other shotgun shells were located in the vehicle. Spent pistol rounds were also located in the vehicle.
Officers conducting an investigation in the Lincoln Homes area shooting eventually located several spent pistol rounds and several spent shotgun shells that matched the shells located during the execution of the search warrant.
Leslie was then arrested and charged, and West said to his knowledge the man does not have a previous criminal record related to gun violence.
West said he felt that the saturation patrol being conducted in the area allowed the officers to make a swift arrest in the shooting.
"I think it helped out a great deal because we were in that area and we had multiple officers in that area," West said. "It just so happens that's where the individual came back to. I think the saturation patrol, or at least having a number of officers in an area that we think we're going to have problems or are currently having problems in always helps us. That was the whole point of calling the sheriff to see if he had some deputies that could assist us, and then we called some of our officers in on their days off to assist us. I think we ended up having five deputies and four patrol officers. We're going to continue doing that for the foreseeable future."