He told her he was 17, just a few months shy of 18. In reality, the “boy” she had been talking to was a 28-year-old sheriff’s deputy from Virginia named Austin Lee Edwards. “The Washington County’s Sheriff’s office gave Austin Lee Edwards a gun, a badge and cloaked him with the authority of the law,” Perry said in a statement. …
Mychelle Blandin’s parents and sister were victims of a triple homicide in Riverside that authorities say began with a “catfishing” case involving Blandin’s niece. Relatives of the Riverside family killed by “catfish” cop Austin Lee Edwards nearly a year ago filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Virginia sheriff’s office that hired him. Edwards, a former Virginia state trooper then employed …
At a news conference Wednesday, Michelle Blandin, center, grasps her husband’s arm while talking about her sister, Brooke Winek, and her parents, Mark and Sharie Winek, all three of whom were killed Friday in Riverside. The 28-year-old Virginia cop who killed three family members of a Riverside teenager had posed online as a teen to “groom” the 15-year-old girl, the …
A woman looks at a memorial for three people whose bodies were found inside the burning Riverside home on Friday. “Detectives determined Edwards had met the female teenager through the common form of online deception known as ‘catfishing,’ where someone pretends to be a different person than they actually are,” authorities said in the release. Edwards completed training with the …
