Skateboarders 'PO'ed' they're linked to Monday night downtown shooting
FORT WAYNE, Ind. ---The downtown skate park that abuts Headwaters Park is kind of a safe zone for young people who love the sport.
The skate park community is now "pissed off" that media and other folks are suggesting that Monday night’s downtown shooting of a 45-year-old homeless man was at the park.
“They weren’t skaters,” says Austin Enyeart who lives in the area and was the first person to help the victim walking on a path away from the area around 9:15 p.m. “My cousin (a skater) didn’t know them.”
When one of the two 21-year-olds shot the victim, they fled but exchanged words with the kids at the park, Enyeart said.
“They were actually yelling at them,” Enyeart reported. “They flashed the gun at (them).” The skaters were “hiding in the bowls in the skate park.”
It was up to Fort Wayne detective Larry Tague to piece together facts and write a probable cause affidavit identifying Cody McNabb and Conner Pease as the two punks who (allegedly) shot this poor guy. Both deny firing the gun, however.
As he hobbled from the base of the Martin Luther King Bridge, where he’d been using an outlet to charge his phone when he was shot in the foot, through the path at Headwaters Park, he met Enyeart coming the other way on his electric bike, Enyeart said.
“I’ve been shot,” he told Enyeart. Court documents say he was shot in the left foot after one of the two shot into the ground, perhaps trying to scare him into handing over his “bag.”
“He was looking for help and I was the first person (he saw),” Enyeart said.
Enyeart got him to the steps of Headwaters Park across from the Allen County Jail on Clinton Street and waited until police and EMS showed up. He estimated help came in about a minute.
Meanwhile police tracked McNabb and Pease quickly to McNabb’s gold Ford Edge with a white driver’s door. They detained the duo and took them to police headquarters, not even a mile away, while for questioning. Police found a black Stoeger semi-automatic 9mm pistol hidden on top of the rear driver's side tire under the fender, court documents said.
Police then found a "live unspent 9mm bulet" on the sidewalk where the shooting took place.
From left: Conner Pease and Cody McNabb have been charged in the shooting of a 45 year-old homeless man near the MLK Bridge downtown Monday.
Neither one would admit to shooting the man and they said they’d been drinking, the kind of excuse that won’t hold up in court.
They’ve both been charged with robbery resulting in serious bodily injury, a level 2 felony that will get you between 10 and 30 years with an advisory sentence of 17.5 years in prison, not jail. There’s a difference, particularly in Indiana.
Neither one of these guys has an appointed public defender nor a prosecutor on the case., according to online court records. Their next hearings are Sept. 21 and then on Nov. 9.
McNabb was released on a $10,000 bond with pre trial services, a jail spokesman said Thursday morning. Pease is currently being held at the jail.
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