A 46-year-old Detroit man was killed at Peninsular Place apartments Sunday night.
Ypsilanti Police have already arrested two suspects, a 20-year-old male and a 20-year-old female, a couple who lives at Peninsular Place.
The two were roommates with the victim’s 19-year-old daughter, Raven Lawrence, a nursing student at Eastern Michigan University.
The victim, John Lawrence, went to the apartment to help his daughter with a financial dispute she was having with her female roommate.
“It was a situation involving our lease,” Raven said in an interview with AnnArbor.com.
Raven told AnnArbor.com her roommate’s boyfriend had moved into the apartment along with the couple’s two-month-old baby. Talk concerning the lease become an argument, and when Raven felt threatened she called her parents. Her father went to the apartment to take her away for the night.
“My dad came. He had his gun on him and he told me to take it outside,” Raven told AnnArbor.com.
Raven said she took her father’s registered handgun to his car while he and the couple stayed in the apartment. When she returned, the apartment door was locked and she was only able to re-enter when police arrived.
When Raven went back inside, her father had been struck with a frying pan and was lying on the floor dead.
A preliminary autopsy was later performed on John’s body by the Washtenaw County Medical Examiner. It revealed that blunt force trauma might not have been the cause of his death, but the final autopsy and toxicology reports will not be released for several more weeks.
Ypsilanti Police Detective Joe Yuhas told AnnArbor.com the police have taken the warrant to the prosecutor’s office for review and are waiting for them to determine the charges, if any, against the couple.
The Peninsular Place apartments are located across the street from EMU, and it’s the same complex where EMU student Julia Niswender was murdered in December.
