Following a manhunt that began in East Ridge, Tennessee and spanned multiple states, Casey James Lawhorn, a man who confessed over Facebook to fatally shooting his mother and his friend, has been found dead in Vossburg, Mississippi from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.
According to ABC, Lawhorn admitted in the now-deleted Facebook post to shooting “a close friend,” since identified as Avery Gaines, and then his own mother, Vi Lawhorn, at around 1:30 in the morning on Sunday, April 8. In the post, Lawhorn states he is “almost 24,” claims he was struggling in college, and that he used a “stolen .22 LR rifle” to commit the murders.
Lawhorn further claimed in the Facebook post to be writing it from the side of I-95, where his car had broken down, though it is unconfirmed whether this is the same spot where the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department eventually confirmed an abandoned Gold Taurus to be his.
According to an earlier report by ABC, East Ridge police dispatchers received a call following the Facebook post on Sunday evening from a man they believed to be Lawhorn. In the phone call, Lawhorn directed police to the location of the bodies, admitted to the killings, and told police he was headed to a location north of the city to commit suicide.
In the graphic and confessional Facebook post, which was over 1,000 words long, Lawhorn describes the murders in detail. He admits to shooting his friend once in the head while he slept on the Lawhorns’ couch, before entering his mother’s room and firing twice into the dark.
“She screamed the worst scream I’ve ever heard,” he wrote. “Movies really don’t do justice to how true terror sounds.”
The first two shots were non-fatal, according to Lawhorn, and so, after unjamming the gun, he turned the lights on in the room and fired twice more.
“The whole event took probably 3 or 4 minutes,” he wrote. “I had hoped both were going to be quick and efficient. I didn’t want my mom to suffer, to die in horror, to die with the knowledge that her son did it.”
While Lawhorn admits in the post to struggling in school and contemplating suicide, no specific motive has been identified.
“What I look forward to is the nothingness after death,” he wrote, in concluding the post. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about murder, wondering what it feels like. But I’ve barely felt anything.”