Virginia murder suspects on the run awakened, arrested on California’s Redwood Coast
A pair on the run from a murder charge in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains were arrested early Wednesday nearly 3,000 miles away by Humboldt State University police officers on California’s Redwood Coast.
Daniel Fish and Ashleigh Nicole McCallister were captured without incident just after 1 a.m. Wednesday. The pair, along with an unidentified third man, were sleeping in a stairwell near their vehicle parked at a university corporation yard building in Arcata when the campus officers found the trio, according to a department news release published Thursday in the Times Standard of Eureka. The unidentified third man was not connected to the pair and was released.
Arcata is about 300 miles northwest of Sacramento.
Fish and McCallister were in custody Thursday at Humboldt County Jail in Eureka, booking records showed, where they await extradition to Virginia on second-degree murder charges.
Fish, 37, and McCallister, 23 – both of Martinsville, Virginia – had been on the run for weeks.
They reportedly fled in the late hours of June 5, when sheriff’s deputies in Henry County, Virginia, found 39-year-old Robert Wayne Williams dead of multiple gunshot wounds inside the doorway of his Bassett, Virginia apartment, the local online publication Martinsville Media reported.
Authorities were able to track down a third suspect, Douglas Hampton Gillespie, in Texas. Gillespie, 25, has since been returned to Virginia to face second-degree murder charges, the Martinsville Bulletin reported.
But Fish and McCallister eluded capture – traveling from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to the redwoods of Humboldt County – until they were awakened in the middle of the night on the corporation yard stairwell.
Campus police Sgt. Joe Jones and partner Officer Billy Kijsriopas were on night patrol at the university’s corporation yard a few miles from the main campus when they found the vehicle carrying stolen license plates, according to the release.
Arcata police also joined in the arrest, Humboldt university police said.
In the statement, interim Humboldt State University Police Chief Christina Lofthouse said she hoped the arrests “will give the family of the victim some peace and allow the healing process to begin.”
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