On the night he was arrested as the suspect in the Interstate 10 shootings, Leslie Merritt Jr. asked detectives whether he was in custody for a traffic ticket.
“Am I being arrested?” Merritt asked detectives after a swarm of officers took him into custody outside a Glendale Walmart on Sept. 18, 2016.
Before detectives told him why he was in their cramped, white-walled room, he mentioned wanting his wallet so he could get out of jail in the morning.
But that morning would not come for six months. Merritt, who was later accused of four of the eleven shots-fired incidents along Valley freeways, would remain in jail for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Arizona Cardinals’ march deep into the NFL playoffs.
FULL COVERAGE: VALLEY FREEWAY SHOOTINGS
But before all of that, and before he was formally escorted to jail, he vehemently denied any involvement in the shootings.
“I’ll swear on the Bible… I did not do this,” Merritt told the two detectives who interrogated him after they revealed that he was not in their custody for a traffic ticket.
“The Bible’s not going to help you right now,” a detective said.
Detectives repeatedly told Merritt that their science showed that his gun fired the bullets that struck vehicles along I-10.
“The truth is that I have not shot my [expletive] gun in at least the last two months,” Merritt said, a scenario that, if true, would exclude him as a possible suspect.
In April, a judge approved the prosecution’s decision to drop the charges against Merritt after prosecutors’ experts could not definitively confirm (nor rule out) whether Merritt’s gun fired the bullets along I-10.
Prosecutors may refile charges if new evidence is discovered.
DPS Director Frank Milstead said in a late-April news conference that he still believes that Merritt is their suspect.
