Police: Georgia teens' alleged executioner stole from them
ATLANTA - Police say the suspect accused of killing two teenagers near Atlanta stole the girl's wallet and the boy's car jumper cables after he killed both with gunshots to the head.
The details are contained in arrest warrants filed in the municipal court of Roswell, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb.
The warrants say 20-year-old Jeffrey Hazelwood followed 17-year-olds Natalie Henderson and Carter Davis into an alley behind a Publix grocery store before shooting each teenager once in the head on Aug. 1.
Hazelwood is charged with murder and theft. Police have declined to discuss a possible motive for the slayings. Henderson and Davis, who used to live in Rapid City, South Dakota, would have been high school seniors this year.
Past police calls to Hazelwood's home also show he was identified as the suspect in the theft of a rifle from his grandfather's gun case.
A February 2015 report released by Roswell police lists Jeffrey Hazelwood as a suspect in the gun theft from his grandfather's house, where Hazelwood lived with his grandparents in the Atlanta suburb of Roswell.
Police released another report of officers called to the same home in 2013 in which Hazelwood's grandparents said their grandson, then 16, stole a sword and knives from their gun safe. That report, which doesn't identify the teen by name, says he'd told his grandmother that "he was going to blow and people were going to get hurt."
A former schoolmate at the former Alternative Youth Academy in Roswell told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Hazelwood "just didn't seem normal."
"You could feel he was strange when you stood next to him," Julio Avendaño, 21, told the paper.
Video from WSB-TV shows Hazelwood during his first court appearance jerking his head around, and his hands and wrists shaking continuously at his first hearing Friday at the Fulton County Jail.
WSB reports that Hazelwood talked to himself during the hearing and appeared to be petting an imaginary dog at one point, but said nothing to the judge.
Hazelwood was raised by his maternal grandparents in the Roswell area after his parents separated when he was a baby, his paternal grandmother, Trudy Darlene Dinwiddie of Moscow Mills, Missouri, told the paper. She said she hasn't seen him since he was young.
In recent months, Hazelwood had been staying with various friends and relatives in Roswell and in nearby Cobb and Cherokee counties, Roswell Police Det. Zachary Frommer told the AP.
"He has some hurt and anger in him, but I don't know what it was about, only Jeff could tell you," his aunt, Kathy Dinwiddie, told WAGA-TV.
Hazelwood's attorney, Lawrence Zimmerman, has said he will provide a vigorous defense.