How a three-year-old TikTok post helped capture a suspect in an unsolved murder
CNN
Joana Peca was gunned down in St. Petersburg, Florida, in July 2021 in front of her two young children. Last week police arrested a suspect – her ex-boyfriend – in Mexico after someone spotted him in a TikTok video.
Eleni Peca’s phone buzzed with a call she had feared would never come. The man accused of killing her only child, Joana Peca, three years ago in St. Petersburg, Florida, had finally been captured. US Marshals arrested him in Mexico City after a TikTok user recognized him from a photo in a video, said the detective on the other end of the line. The suspect, Benjamin Robert “Bambi” Williams, had just been extradited to the United States, police told her. Authorities had waited until he was in custody in Pinellas County to notify her family. Peca was in disbelief when she got the call Friday from detective Brian Bilbrey of the St. Petersburg Police Department. Overwhelmed with emotion, she excused herself to gather her thoughts. “I can’t explain the feeling I had that moment. It was the combination of happiness and pain,” she said at a news conference Tuesday. “I remember going like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God! Are you sure?’ I was going back and forth around the house.”
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