Suspect in Fla. slaying, missing girl found in El Paso
Source: El Paso Times (Original Article)
A person of interest in the violent slaying of an elderly disabled man in Putnam County, Fla., was arrested Saturday in El Paso with a 15-year-old girl who had been reported missing since April 22, officials said.Toby Lee Lowry, 22, and the girl, Morgan Amanda Leppert, were found with a third person panhandling along the Interstate 10 Gateway at Yarbrough after a motorist, Stacy Fuller, recognized the missing girl from an earlier television news report, officials said. “I was actually on Gateway West and I was making a u-turn to get on the other side of Interstate 10, and the couple was standing on the corner,” Fuller told the El Paso Times. “I started thinking, ‘They look familiar.’ The one thing that kind of made me think it was them — you usually don’t see a young couple like that on the corner.”Fuller, who is in El Paso on business from Oklahoma, called law enforcement after he thought the couple panhandling matched the description of the Amber Alert and the morning national media report, he said. Leppert, Lowry and the third panhandler all were taken into custody by the El Paso Police Department.Lowry and Leppert were traveling in a silver 2003 Toyota Tacoma owned by 66-year-old James Stewart, whose body was found by sheriff’s investigators on Thursday in his Florida home after he was killed in a “violent death,” said Putnam County Sheriff Dean Kelly, who did not elaborate. Kelly said Stewart was born without hands.”Whoever did this, whether it’s Lowry or Advertisementwhoever, is absolutely deplorable,” Kelly said. “What a punk that would do that.”Kelly said he did not know what kind of relationship Stewart might have had with Leppert or Lowry. A telephone call from Stewart’s house to Leppert’s cell phone initially linked the homicide investigation to the missing-child report, sheriff’s officials said. The El Paso Police Department made contact with Leppert’s family and was expected to allow the girl to get in touch with her mother, Bank Credit Cards Kelly said. He added that because …continue reading