A man admitted smoking a hallucinogenic drug before killing two women and critically injuring another with a machete in a downtown Scranton apartment building Tuesday evening, according to an arrest affidavit.
Michael Willie Marquis Woods, 38, also killed a service dog belonging to one of the dead women.
In a text interview Wednesday morning, Lackawanna County District Attorney Brian Gallagher called the murder scene on the sixth floor of the Jermyn Apartments “one of the ... most horrific scenes” he’s ever seen.
Police charged Woods, 38, who lived in the building, with two counts of criminal homicide, one count of attempted criminal homicide, two counts of aggravated assault and one count of aggravated cruelty to animals. He’s in the Lackawanna County Prison, held without bail. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for Dec. 23 at 9:30 a.m.
The affidavits do not name the victims, whose identities remained undisclosed early this afternoon.
Police say they found suspect on street with machete
Arriving police encountered Woods holding the machete near Biden Street and Wyoming Avenue, the intersection closest to the Jermyn Apartments where Woods and the women lived.
Officers ordered him to drop the machete.
“The suspect stopped and dropped the machete and was taken into custody,” city police detectives Michael Schultz and Jason Hyler wrote in an arrest affidavit. “The suspect had blood on his clothing. The machete also had blood on it ... The suspect with the machete made statements that he smoked PCP earlier.”
PCP, the slang name for phencyclidine, produces “mind-altering, hallucinogenic effects,” according to the National Drug Intelligence Center’s website. It was banned in 1978 for anything but research purposes.
Inside the apartment building, police found large amounts of blood outside two sixth-floor rooms and an elevator and a video recording of the attack.
They found one woman near the elevator and room 608, bleeding from an upper shoulder wound. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Police tried to contact the occupants of apartment 608.
“There was no answer,” the detectives wrote. “Police opened the door and found a female with severe chest wounds from an apparent stabbing. The female was unresponsive and wedged behind the door.”
She also died at the hospital.
“Police found a deceased canine, a service dog, in room 608 ... under the bed,” the affidavit says. “The labrador retriever was apparently stabbed and was dead.”
At apartment 605, they found a lot more blood and tried to contact the occupants.
A woman answered the door.
“The female’s hand was almost completely severed from her arm, and she suffered from a severe chest wound from an apparent stabbing,” the detectives wrote.
She remains in critical condition at the hospital.
Witness 'said there was screaming'
A witness saw Woods stab the two dead women.
“She said there was screaming” and saw the apartment 605 woman open her door before Woods stabbed her.
The video shows Woods leaving his apartment, 612, “and walking down the hallway with a machete,” according to the affidavit.
As he walks, the witness enters 608 and Woods follows her inside.
Shortly afterward, the witness and 608’s tenant leave the apartment with Woods following behind them, still holding the machete.
“As Woods approaches the elevator area, the elevator doors open and (the) victim (found near the elevator) steps off,” the affidavit says. “Woods attacks (the woman) by stabbing her in the chest, causing her to fall to the floor. He then attacks (the woman from 608) by throwing her to the ground and stabbing her in the chest.”
The witness managed to escape into her apartment “around the corner.”
At that point, the woman who survived opens her door and “Woods forces his way inside, attacking her by stabbing her in the chest.”
Woods heads for the elevator, emerges in the first-floor lobby and exits the building where police apprehend him.
