COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Sheriff's deputies have arrested a man after they said he killed four members of his family, including a child, in southern Ohio, WSAZ reports.
Arron Lawson, 23, led police on a manhunt since Thursday, when the bodies of three adults and a 7-year-old boy were found in and near a trailer in Lawrence County.
Lawson is wanted on warrants for three counts of murder and one count of aggravated murder. He was seen being taken into the Lawrence County Jail by deputies at about 11 a.m. to the sounds of applause from residents gathered in the area.
Deputies spotted Lawson early Thursday in a blue truck in Ironton, about 15 miles south of where the victims' bodies were found in a trailer home, but they lost him after a brief chase when he crashed into a ditch and ran into the woods in the dark, Lawrence County Sheriff Jeffery Lawless said.
It has publicly identified only one of the victims: 7-year-old Devin Holston, who initially was the subject of a missing-child alert after the other bodies were found Wednesday evening. Authorities spent hours searching for him, only to later find the boy dead in the same house trailer, his body apparently hidden, Lawless said.
A fourth adult who came upon the scene after work was stabbed there and fled to seek help, the sheriff said. That victim was later flown to a hospital in Huntington, West Virginia, that wasn't giving updates about the person's condition.
Lawson lived just up the road from the trailer home.
- RELATED: Updates from WSAZ-TV
Lawless told the Ironton Tribune that all those involved were somehow related.
None of the dead adults or injured victim has been identified. The sheriff's office said releasing further information would compromise the investigation.
Agents from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, including crime-scene and cyber-unit investigators, are assisting Lawrence County with the case, said Jill Del Greco, a spokeswoman for BCI and the state attorney general's office.
Lawless said schools in the Rock Hill district were closed Thursday because of the attacks.
The initial report about the slayings — violence against multiple people found at properties of related residents — recalled details from a still-unsolved homicide case that rattled rural southern Ohio last year. But investigators have no indication of a connection between the cases, Del Greco said.
The deaths on Wednesday occurred roughly 40 miles southeast of the Piketon area, where eight people from the Rhoden family were found shot to death in four homes in April 2016.
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Associated Press writer Mark Gillispie in Cleveland contributed to this report.
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