to the time stamp. i m going to pay attention to the tweet. do we have brian stelter coming in on this? yes. thank you, brian. sorry. so this is a huge announcement coming from the pennsylvania state police. yeah. that time stamp, just a few minutes ago eastern time. we re standing by for a press conference. top of the hour in cleveland. maybe we ll get more information from ohio authorities. but this news is coming from erie pennsylvania which is one of the locations where there was a search. after the shooting on srunday that was shown on facebook and he was talking with his friends on foacebook live, holding the phone up. his account was deleted, but his cell phone did register a ping on a cell phone you tower in pennsylvania. there was suspicion he had been in or around erie pennsylvania. authorities saying this was a sel self-inflicted gunshot wound this morning. let me bring in sarah gannon who s been following this case
with us. art, you ve been following this case from the beginning. as we wait from the confirmation from cleveland, pennsylvania state plolice saying they had a brief pursuit and the suspect killed himself. explain what you believe would be happening on this very important crime scenes. because mr. stephens said he had killed others. there s no proof of there. you re right, there is no proof of it. is this bravado on his part? now that it looks like we ll get confirmation that it is probably him, i can t imagine knowing how great of an organization is the state police are in pennsylvania that they would go ahead and put this out without themselves being pretty sure that it is stephens. what they ll be doing now, taking dna, taking fingerprints, taking photographs, and getting them back to cleveland for the 100% confirmation. i m pretty sure that s what we re going to hear in this particular press conference. the interesting thing now is we ve got a lot of time here to
not a police presence, but our federal partners were engaged in that area. chief, had he done anything to alter his appearance other than shave his head? i don t know. it happened less than an hour ago. our investigators are on their way now. we have several of our federal partners already there conversing with the state police in pennsylvania. and as soon as we get all of those details we will push that back out. have you spoken with the family? we have spoken with all of the families involved. all of the people that are really involve nevada this case. they have been notified and we ask that you guys give them a little space in this because for them it is not over into we ask you give him space. are you disappointed it end this way? it started with a tragedy and
waiting for confirmation. quote, they want to see the body, they want to make sure it was him. this is what we re hearing from pennsylvania state police. of course, erie county and that area, which is just about 90 miles east of where we are in cleveland, a straight shot on i-90, has been a focus of this investigation from the beginning. authorities were suspecting that he may have been traveling east after that shooting here in downtown cleveland. based on early information from the erie from officials in erie who said that there was a cell phone ping that was detected from steve stephens cell phone after the shooting occurred. now, they later walked that back and there was never really a good clarification on whether or not that ping had come from one of his devices. we do know that he had multiple devices that the police talked about knowing how many devices he had.
as an individual walking down the street in the wrong place at the wrong time was key to capturing him as quick as we could. so that he wouldn t commit another murder. i mean, this was so far off the scale of looking at there was absolutely no connection between mr. stephens and mr. godwin and he just picked him out as a poor individual walking down the street. so that means he was open to committing other homicides as he threatened to. it was key to get him as quick as we could. i think the lead going to erie pennsylvania, obviously that s where he was hiding out, about 90 miles from where he committed the crime. it s going to be real important for the pennsylvania state police to pour over that vehicle, find out what else is in the car, and of course if there s any other evidence of other crimes that he might have committed. i hope sarah is still with us back in cleveland. sarah, are you still with us?