Update: 10:45 PM: Abraham Pearson was captured walking, unarmed, near I-94 and Mt. Elliott by Detroit Police acting on a tip, reports the Detroit Free Press.
Update: 6 p.m.: Officials moved the Detroit Police command vehicle and said their search for Abraham Pearson was going from being focused on the neighborhood near the Belle Isle Bridge to being concentrated citywide.
Update, 5:04 p.m.: Rod Meloni reports on WDIV-TV that Pearson was in a minor accident with a woman on E. Jefferson as he fled. When he refused to stop, she pursued him until he ditched his car in a field near the Belle Isle Bridge. She did not who who she was chasing.
Update, 12:07 p.m.: In an interview with WXYZ-TV, the carjacked woman said the suspect told her: "I don't want to hurt you. I will kill you."
Update, 11:43 a.m.: Intense police activity in the neighborhood near the Belle Isle Bridge, where personnel from numerous law enforcement agencies are gathered. The Detroit and Wayne County special response teams are on the scene, near where the minivan was recovered not long after the suspect carjacked it downtown.
Police and tracking dogs are conducting an intense manhunt after a prisoner stabbed a Wayne County sheriff's deputy this morning, stole his uniform and then escaped by carjacking a minivan in front of Detroit's former police headquarters.
Authorities identified the suspect as Abraham Pearson, 25, who was scheduled to be sentenced Monday morning on several felonies, Detroit Police Chief James Craig told reporters. Pearson's name earlier was given as Derreck White, an alias.
Craig said Pearson abandoned the minivan after a minor accident with another car on Concord and E. Lafayette on Detroit's East Side, near the Belle Isle Bridge, about two miles from downtown. It could be seen wedged into a clump of trees and bushes on a vacant lot.
Pearson is no longer wearing the deputy's clothing, Craig said. Police are interviewing witnesses at that location, and officers with dogs are searching the neighborhood. FBI agents and other law enforcement agencies are assisting.
Pearson attacked the deputy with a weapon he had fashioned out of a comb, according to Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon.
"He used the comb...to stab a deputy several times," Napoleon said. The deputy, Harrison Tolliver, is in good condition.
Pulling up his pants as he fled
Napoleon said the incident took place on the seventh floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice shortly after 8 a.m.
The deputy, unarmed as normal when transporting prisoners and alone, was escorting three prisoners into holding cells.
"He just overpowered the deputy," Napoleon said, adding that the deputy was by himself because of "staffing levels."
After Tolliver removed Pearson's handcuffs, White stabbed the deputy several times in the neck, breaking his comb in the process, then stole the deputy's keys and uniform, and left on the prisoner elevator. The deputy summoned help after he recovered, Napoleon said.
Witnesses said the suspect ran through downtown streets wearing the deputy's uniform, but looking disheveled, pulling up his pants as he ran.
Frank Murphy is on lockdown on a busy morning on which the preliminary examination for Bob Bashara was scheduled to begin. Bashara is accused of killing his wife, a popular Grosse Pointe marketing executive.
At the time of the incident, deputies and police, guns drawn, rushed out of the court building, startling bystanders.
Witnesses told TV reporters the suspect carjacked a 2000 Dodge caravan near the courthouse on Beaubien. The driver, a woman who was by herself, was not taken hostage, and she was not injured.
In an interview with WXYZ-TV, the woman, identified as a single mother of three named Patricia Banford, said: "He was serious. He said, 'I don't want to hurt you. I will kill you.' "
Pearson took the wheel and stopped for a stop sign before roaring off, witnesses said.
He was convicted last month of carjacking, armed robbery, unlawful driving away of a vehicle, being in possession of a financial transaction device, felony firearm, possession of a firearm by a felon and carrying a concealed weapon. His sentencing was to have been before Wayne County Circuit Judge Judge Dana M. Hathaway.
Pearson is 5-foot-6 and 155 pounds, wears his hair in dreadlocks and has ""Hot Boyz" tattooed on his left forearm. Police said Hot Boyz is the name of a carjacking gang. Pearson also is known as Weezy and D.C.
