Eric Ramsey’s Facebook post 'Well folkes im about to get shot’: Suicide by cop?

Suspect Eric Ramsey’s last Facebook entry at 3:15 a.m. on Thursday saying “Well folkes im about to get shot. Peace" was posted by 30-year-old Eric Ramsey shortly before he was fatally shot by a police officer. About 1 a.m. on Thursday, Eric Ramsey had made another Facebook post on the page of one of his 117 online Facebook friends saying “It’s been real, bro, wish I could have hung with you one last time. Love you brother,” reports the Morning Sun on Jan. 19, 2013.

“Police agreed Friday that Ramsey, 30, armed with a BB-gun but carrying cans of stolen gasoline, likely planned to kill only his victim but changed his mind and wanted to be shot after she jumped from his moving car south of Mt. Pleasant. His early-morning posting on a friend’s page was in addition to a separate posting that he expected to be shot made minutes before he rammed a sheriff’s patrol car and was killed by police gunfire near Gaylord.”

In a telephone interview with CNN, Isabella County Sheriff Leo Mioduszewski said that Eric Ramsey’s last Facebook post which said “Well folkes im about to get shot. Peace," was made at around 3:15 a.m. on Thursday.

Before getting fatally shot by a police officer, Eric Ramsey allegedly abducted a female CMU college student at gunpoint, raped her, set fire to the house in which she was hiding, stole a flatbed truck, and rammed three police cars.

Central Michigan University Police Chief Bill Yeagley told the Detroit Free Press that “I've been in this community for 35 years. I don't remember anything like this.”

Eric Ramsey is from central Michigan and a parolee rapist. After having served a five-year prison term for “felonious assault,” Eric Ramsey was paroled last summer.

Around 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Eric Ramsey approached a female student with a gun as she was walking to her Ford Escape “which was parked in a lot just outside the Student Activities Center in the middle of CMU's Mt. Pleasant campus.” According to police, the alleged suspect Eric Ramsey told the female student that he had picked her randomly.

After his abduction, Eric Ramsey told the female student to “drive to a house just off campus, on South Crawford Street, where she was bound and raped. Police said the house was owned by Ramsey's mother, with whom he was living.”

After the rape, Eric Ramsey forced the female back in the SUV and drove, along with two cans of gasoline, down the road. The female student told a woman police officer after her rescue that “he told her he was going to kill her.”

While Eric Ramsey was driving, the female student jumped out of the SUV and ran to a house on south Mission Road in Shepherd. James Persyn III, the 14-year-old living in the house along with his 11-year-old sister and 2-year-old brother, heard the female victim's banging at the front door and the female student’s cry for help. “She was saying, 'Help me! Please let me in. Help! Help!' … I let her in, and she asked me if my parents were home. I told her no. She said, 'We've got to hide. I was just kidnapped, and I've just jumped out of a vehicle. We've got to hide now.' "

When Eric Ramsey banged at the door and demanded to be let in, 14-year-old James stood with his hunting knife by the bathroom door and his siblings and the female student hid in the bathtub. The female student called 911 and James called his father “who had left to pick up his fiancée from a nearby store and pizza shop where she works.”

According to the police account, suspect Eric Ramsey poured gasoline around the house and set it on fire before taking off again in the victim’s SUV. By the time 14-year-old James’ father arrived at the home, the front of the house had caught on fire. At the time that James’ dad was able to smother and stomp out the fire, the police had also arrived.

Around 2:50 a.m., about five hours after the abduction of the female student had begun, “Michigan State Police investigated a suspicious vehicle in a parking lot in Gaylord. The vehicle -- the victim's SUV -- rammed the troopers' car three times, ‘rendering it inoperable,’ the State Police said in a release.”

The State Police followed suspect Eric Ramsey’s SUV tracks to an elk ranch which is owned by the city of Gaylord. Troopers on foot pursued the tracks, which led through an 8-foot high enclosure, for about a mile when they found the SUV stuck in the snow. Footprints led the troopers to Arrow Sanitation from where other vehicle tracks could be detected. Police subsequently issued a description “for a possible stolen truck.”

Around 4:15 a.m., almost seven hours after the abduction of the female college student, “troopers were parked just north of Frederic, when a 1-ton flatbed truck came up behind them without headlights on and smashed into their patrol vehicle. The truck then turned around and rammed a Crawford County sheriff's car, causing the vehicles to get wedged together. The deputy, after being pinned inside briefly, got out and fatally shot Ramsay as he sat in the cab, authorities said.”

Eric Ramsey had made his last Facebook entry “Well folkes im about to get shot. Peace” at 3:15 a.m. on Thursday morning according to Isabella County Sheriff Leo Mioduszewski’s telephone interview with CNN.

Eric Ramsey appeared to have made his last Facebook entry sometime after he had rammed the trooper’s car three times with the SUV at about 2:50 a.m and before Eric Ramsey smashed with the 1-ton flatbed truck “without headlights on” into the patrol vehicle at about 4:15 a.m.

Was it one hour of agony or a lifetime of agony for Eric Ramsey?

Undoubtedly, the heroes in the Eric Ramsey story are the female student who had the courage to jump out of the moving SUV and the 14-year-old who had the courage to come to her rescue. The female victim's rape and the broken arm which she suffered during her jump from the SUV will most likely leave lifelong haunting memories and scars. Central Michigan University Police Chief Bill Yeagley told the Detroit Free Press that “I believe she made all the right choices. She's the true hero in this."

The story behind 30-year-old suspect Eric Ramsey is under investigation.

Coincidentally, Tiffany Ramon, the 28-year-old fiancée of the 14-year-old hero’s dad and “mother of one of the three children in the house where the victim took refuge, said she was shocked Thursday morning when authorities told her the suspect's name. She said she and Ramsey attended Shepherd High School, graduating in 2002.”

"When I was in high school with him, and after high school, I thought he was a pretty decent guy. … I didn't hear many bad things about him. He was a little bit mischievous, and a little bit of a troublemaker, but I never thought he would be that hardened."

Ten years after their graduation, Tiffany Ramon saw Eric Ramsey again. “Ramon said she saw Ramsey a few times in recent months when he stopped in at her workplace, J and M Produce, to buy food, pop and cigarettes. It seemed like prison changed him, she said, but he still had an easygoing demeanor.’ He looked aged, like tired in the eyes, like prison had hardened him a little bit. … But he didn't seem violent or destructive to me’."

From July 2007 to July 2012, Eric Ramsey was serving a prison term “on a conviction for assault with the intent to cause great bodily harm less than murder. He had previous convictions for malicious destruction of fire department or police property, assaulting/resisting/obstructing a police officer, and assault with a dangerous weapon,” according to the Detroit Free Press

In 2012, Eric Ramsey was released by the parole board “at his minimum sentence time, Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said. … During his time in several Michigan prisons, he was classified as a minimum-security prisoner. … He served his last three months at a boot camp outside of Chelsea in Washtenaw County.”

After his release, Eric Ramsey moved in with his mother and “wore a tether, which allowed authorities to make sure he was in by curfew. … The tether was removed Nov. 9, and Ramsey had to check in with his parole officer twice a month. His last parole check-in occurred Jan. 8. He was employed in a full-time job and following all the conditions of his parole," said the Michigan Department of Corrections spokesperson Russ Marlan.

Eric Ramsey’s last Facebook post and the subsequent responses seem to indicate that Eric Ramsey was not an unintelligent guy. One of the responses to Eric Ramsey’s last Facebook post says (see above picture),

“I don’t care what anyone says, there was motive behind his madness, he was such a sweet and caring person. someone had to of set him over the edge, it doesn’t justify what hes done. but s… like this doesn’t just happen for nothing.”

Did Eric Ramsey’s path down the wrong road begin in prison or was Eric Ramsey’s life, which might have ended up in “suicide by cop,” already laid out during his school years. Only time and further investigations will tell.

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