Danville police make no arrests in deadly shootings
Danville police officer Chad Turner looks for evidence near a window through which a 30-year-old man is believed to have jumped before he collapsed and died in the middle of Main Street in Danville, Ill., Sunday. The bodies of two women were found inside Holly Hart, AP
March 27, 2007
DANVILLE, Ill. – Police said they had leads but had made no arrests Monday in the weekend shooting deaths of three people at a duplex next door to a Danville fire station.
“The detective group is working on some leads, but that’s all we have right now,” police and fire spokesman Larry Thomason said of the Sunday shootings.
Vermilion County Coroner Peggy Johnson on Monday identified two of the victims as 30-year-old Rodney Pepper and 19-year-old Madisen Leverenz, both of Danville.
Johnson, however, declined to release the name of the third victim, a 19-year-old Danville woman, citing a request for privacy made by the woman’s mother.
“That’s the way I’m leaving it,” Johnson said. “I’m just going to honor her request.”
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Johnson also declined to discuss the details of autopsies conducted on the three Monday, other than to say they died of gunshot wounds.
At least one of the three lived in the duplex, Thomason said earlier.
A passer-by saw Pepper lying on the street just after 10 a.m. Sunday and rushed to the fire station to inform authorities, said Thomason and Lt. Rick Gibson, of the Danville Fire Department.
As firefighters tried to revive Pepper, police officers noticed a broken plate-glass window at the duplex that he appeared to have jumped through, authorities said. Officers found the women inside the house.
The three killings were the first in Danville this year, Thomason said, matching the city’s total for 2006.
Sunday’s shootings also were the only triple homicide in the city of 34,000 that Thomason – a 59-year-old Danville native and 36-year veteran of the local police – could recall.
