Suspect in St. Louis teen’s fatal freeway shooting investigated in another roadway attack

The suspect in the fatal freeway shooting of a high school girl just outside St. Louis is being investigated in connection with a second roadway shooting, federal court documents show.

Willie Herndon, a 42-year-old from Arlington, Texas, is accused of killing 17-year-old Alyssa Wilson on Oct. 14 . In a federal complaint, investigators say a spent shell casing matching the one used in Alyssa’s shooting was found close to where a vehicle was struck on another freeway three days earlier.

No one was reported injured in the Oct. 11 shooting in St. Louis proper. The federal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, states that a vehicle that had just exited Interstate 55 was hit by gunfire, and that security video showed a white SUV parked on the side of the interstate at the time before it “fled the scene immediately after the shooting.”

“A single cartridge case was recovered,” the federal complaint states. “The cartridge case’s headstamp was the same manufacturer as the one recovered by investigators during Wilson’s murder investigation.”

Lab testing is being conducted to determine if ballistic evidence ties the two crimes, according to the complaint.

Herndon is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in East St. Louis on Tuesday for a hearing on his pretrial detention on a federal charge of being a felon with a gun, according to the documents, which state he was convicted of felonies in Los Angeles for taking a vehicle without consent in 2001 and for receiving known stolen property and burglary in 2015.

Herndon is also scheduled to appear at a preliminary hearing on Nov. 4 in the same courthouse.

His federal public defender did not respond to a request for comment.

A high schooler’s life cut short

Herndon was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action after his arrest in the killing of Alyssa, a high schooler from nearby Florissant, Missouri, who was driving to a St. Louis Zoo Halloween celebration when she was shot Oct. 14.

“Alyssa was 17, excited about her life, excited about her future,” her father, Robert Hickman, said at a news conference Monday. “This was a senseless act.”

Herndon’s wife, Taiya Herndon, allegedly drove the pair to an Illinois hotel roughly 12 miles from St. Louis after the attack, authorities said. She faces a state charge of hindering prosecution.

Authorities have said Alyssa had no ties to the pair.

It’s not clear if either defendant has been assigned counsel in the state cases. The public defender’s office for the St. Louis area did not respond to a request for comment.

Following a search of the Herndons’ nearby Illinois hotel room after the attack, authorities said they found notebooks with handwritten entries, according to the federal criminal complaint.

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The entries included license plate numbers, descriptions of vehicles and descriptions of law enforcement personnel Willie Herndon believed were following him, the complaint said.

On Oct. 2, the Herndons drove from Texas to Arkansas and then Missouri, arriving the next day, while using one of multiple Oklahoma license plates that did not belong to their white SUV, prosecutors alleged in the complaint. One plate was switched following Alyssa’s shooting, they said.

Killing captured on security video