The two white supremacists with the long rap sheets were arrested Wednesday to end a weeklong run along the West Coast. One worked summers on a construction crew. The other two were career criminals. When their paths cross the teen construction worker was left dead. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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Their wildly divergent paths crossed somewhere in Oregon, leaving 19-year-old Cody Myers dead in the woods while David Joseph Pederson and girlfriend Holly Grigsby went on the lam in the dead youth’s car.
The two white supremacists with the long rap sheets were arrested Wednesday to end a weeklong run along the West Coast, a tear described by a local sheriff as “a vicious, vile reign of terror.”
The two disappeared, fleeing south in a Jeep owned by Pederson’s father, after the ex-con’s stepmother was found dead Aug. 28 in her Washington state home. Pederson’s dad remains missing.
Myers was the antithesis of the two murder suspects. When on the road with his work crew, he called his mother daily. Family members described him as a good student, a jazz fan and a nice kid.
“Cody was devoted to his family,” said his mother, Susan Myers. “He would have done anything to help anybody. He had passion for life, for God, for his beliefs. He didn’t deserve this.”
The two suspects were named as “persons of interest” in the violent death of Myers. It was unclear how they ran into the teen as they dodged authorities conducting a manhunt by air and on the ground.
The last sighting of the suspects before their California arrest came Sunday, when they used a credit card belonging to Pederson’s stepmother at a convenience store.
Pederson, who sports a white supremacist tattoo on his neck, spent all but one year behind bars between the ages of 16 and 31. His criminal past included convictions for robbery, assault and threatening to kill a U.S. judge.
He was released from prison in May – and spent just 134 days on the outside before the cuffs were put on again Wednesday by a California Highway Patrol officer.
Grigsby, 24, first landed behind bars in 2006, doing time for identity theft and unauthorized use of a vehicle. The suspect, who battled drug addiction, was released from prison last year.
Although she was still married, Grigsby began seeing Pederson.
“That man took her on a road straight to hell,” said her husband, Dannel Larson of Portland, Ore.
