Suspect in shooting death of teen on Missouri highway charged in second road incident

Man accused of shooting teen who was driving to a party is also linked to shooting of a vehicle days earlier, police say

A man accused in the shooting death of a Missouri teen has been charged in a second shooting incident – both of which involve firing into cars on the highway.

Alyssa Wilson, 17, was shot and killed as she drove down Interstate 170 in Overland, Missouri, on 14 October. The teen was on her way to a Halloween party at St Louis Zoo, called Boo at the Zoo, when a suspect fired a single shot into the back of Wilson’s Buick Encore.

The shot struck Wilson in the back, incapacitated her, and sent her crashing into a concrete highway median, according to prosecutors. She was pronounced dead at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

The suspected shooter, Willie James Herndon, 43, of Texas, had no known relationship to the teen.

“Alyssa was 17, excited about her life, excited about her future,” her father Robert Hickman said, as state charges were announced . “She had 60 days until she turned 18, and we were getting ready to take our first family vacation together to go to Disney for her to see her favorite person in the world, Princess Tiana, and unfortunately, she’s not going to get to do that any more. This was a senseless act.”

Now, federal court documents show that Herndon has been charged in a second shooting incident, this one just a few days earlier.

On 11 October, St Louis metropolitan police received a report that a vehicle was shot just after exiting Interstate 55 in Missouri. Surveillance footage captured a white SUV fleeing the scene – a vehicle that matched the appearance of Herndon’s Buick Enclave.

A shell casing was also recovered from the scene. Prosecutors said they were conducting ballistics tests to determine if it was fired from the same weapon that killed Wilson.

In a federal criminal complaint, prosecutors lay out how they tracked what appeared to be Herndon’s Buick Enclave from the first shooting incident on 11 October, then the scene of Wilson’s death on 14 October, to a Days Inn in Caseyville, Illinois 16 October.

There, prosecutors approached Herndon’s wife Taiya Herndon, 45, and were speaking to her when Herndon “emerged” from the hotel room and began to flee. As he was arrested, he was “screaming words about a shooting”, prosecutors said.

Inside the Days Inn hotel room, prosecutors said they found a ABC-15 rifle “in plain view”, ammunition that matched the kind used in Wilson’s shooting, a receipt from a gas station near the scene of Wilson’s death on Interstate 170, two license plates and handwritten notes describing police vehicles Herndon believed were tracking him.

Federal prosecutors in Illinois have charged Herndon with being a felon in possession of a firearm. He has separately been charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in St Louis county, Missouri. His federal public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment.