A fugitive parolee has been nabbed at a Dallas bus station in Texas, authorities said Friday, bringing a fatal saga to a grim close. Juan Ramirez Jr., 31, wanted in the stabbing death of a senior citizen in Pontiac, Michigan, was taken into custody Thursday afternoon without incident, as reported by FOX 2 Detroit. The arrest charts the end of a hunt for Ramirez, who was on the lam since the April 27 murder and had previously served nearly a decade behind bars for unrelated crimes.
Gregory Allen Copeland, 69, was the tragic victim of this brutal crime – stabbed multiple times and found lifeless in his own basement on Ivy Street. The events preceding this horrendous act involved a domestic dispute, where Ramirez was reportedly chasing Copeland's niece, a woman he was dating, with a knife. According to the ClickOnDetroit, police discovered the woman, 32, perched atop a carport in a state shockingly shook by the day's horror.
The Oakland County Sheriff's Office, alongside a diligent law enforcement task force, managed to catch up with Ramirez in Dallas. "I appreciate the hard work of our team and our partners to ensure that individuals that perpetrate this kind of violence are held fully accountable," Sheriff Michael Bouchard said in a statement obtained by WWJ Newsradio. “It should be clear you can run, but you can’t hide.”
Ramirez's criminal background includes a parole release from the Michigan Department of Corrections last December, after serving time for unarmed robbery and home invasion. But come mid-February, he managed to quickly abscond from his parole officer's supervision, leading him to be placed on absconder status, an indication of his perceived menace to the public's safety. The circumstances surrounding his travel plans at the time of his recent capture remain unknown, as disclosed by law enforcement.
Now awaiting extradition back to Michigan to face charges that include second-degree murder and assault with intent to murder, Ramirez will have to first contend with a legal procedure – a judge's decision at an extradition hearing in Dallas – scheduled for a later date and shrouded in the immediacy of procedural justice.
