The suspect, Kenneth Gleason, was being held on drug charges. Authorities didn’t yet have enough evidence to charge him with murder, said Sgt. L’Jean McKneely, a Baton Rouge police spokesman.
McKneely said that shell casings from the shootings linked the two slayings and that a car belonging to Gleason fit the description of the vehicle police were looking for. He said authorities had collected other circumstantial evidence but wouldn’t say what it was.
“There is a strong possibility that it could be racially motivated,” he said.
KcKneely said that in both shootings, the suspect fired from his car, walked up to the victims as they were lying on the ground and fired again multiple times. He added that police hadn’t found any relationship between the suspect and the victims.
The shootings happened about 5 miles from each other. The first occurred Tuesday night when Bruce Cofield, 59, who was homeless, was shot to death. The second happened Thursday night when Donald Smart, 49, was gunned down while walking to work at a cafe popular with Louisiana State University students, McKneely said.
Mary Smart, Smart’s aunt, said she was still dealing with the shock of her nephew’s death and couldn’t understand what had happened.
“I’m feeling down and depressed. My nephew, I love him, and he was on his way to work, and that makes it so sad,” she said in a telephone interview Sunday. “He was always smiling and hugging everybody. A lot of people knew him.”
Smart had a son and two daughters, she said.
She declined to comment on police allegations that her nephew might have been shot because of the color of his skin.
“I cannot say,” she said. “Only God knows.”