The former Virginia State Police trooper who killed a California teen’s family last week had to have been planning the crime for months.
TMZ is reporting today that Austin Lee Edwards, 28, who died in a shootout with police after the Nov. 25 triple-murder in Riverside, Calif., paid $80,000 for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Saltville on Nov. 14.
But that’s not all. Photos obtained by TMZ show that Edwards had blacked out the windows of his new home with car tint, and his neighbors told the outlet that the tinting came almost immediately after he bought the house last month.
It’s becoming apparent that Edwards, who started a job with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office on Nov. 16, had plans for the 15-year-old that he’d met online that involved that house.
For some geographical context, Saltville, population 2,077, is located on the Smyth County/Washington County county line in Southwest Virginia, two hours southwest of Roanoke.
And for some timeline context, Edwards had just resigned his job with the Virginia State Police on Oct. 28, two weeks before he’d completed the purchase of the home in Saltville.
We don’t yet have a firm grasp on how long he’d been in contact with the teen in Riverside online.
But it does come across as odd that Edwards would resign his State Police job after only having been on the job for nine months.
Edwards graduated from the Virginia State Police training academy back in January, and was assigned to Henrico.
It’s usually the case that law enforcement officers seek to work their way up from local police and sheriff’s office jobs in the direction of a post with the State Police, not the other way around.
An exception there would be using experience at the State Police to land a high-profile job as a police chief or to run for an open county sheriff seat.
Edwards wasn’t trading in his nine months in Henrico for a plum local post.
According to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, Edwards had been hired for a job in the patrol division, pretty much the lowest rung on the ladder.
So, Edwards, who had told the 15-year-old in Riverside that he was 17, got in his car in Saltville last Tuesday or Wednesday, drove across the country, killed the girl’s mother and grandparents, set fire to their home, abducted the teen, and was, you have to assume, planning to drive her back to Southwest Virginia, where he had a job with the local sheriff’s office, to a house with tinted windows.
He didn’t concoct this plan, hare-brained as it was, on a whim.
And somehow, this guy got a job with one, no, actually, two law enforcement agencies, in the span of a year.
Some context there to wrap this up: for the State Police job, Edwards had to get past a background check that required passage of written, psychological and physical testing, along with a pre-employment polygraph.
“At no time during that extensive process were there any indicators of concern,” State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller told the (Staunton, Va.) News Leader.
Geller also confirmed that Edwards’ behavior during his brief tenure with VSP didn’t trigger any internal administrative or criminal investigations.
He had to have been planning what was to transpire last week during his time with the State Police.
And somehow, he was able to keep it together enough on the job not to give himself away.
You can bet that there are a lot of folks in the State Police and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office wondering right now how they missed out on ferreting out the monster in their midst.
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Chris Graham
