Authorities release 911 call from multi-state crime rampage

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico authorities have released 911 audio from a victim in a three-state crime rampage that included the killings of the suspect's girlfriend and a cleaning woman at a church.

Law enforcement officers arrested 28-year-old Alex Deaton in Kansas on Wednesday after two Mississippi slayings, a New Mexico carjacking and the shooting of a store clerk west of Wichita.

In the audio released Thursday, 19-year-old Devon Philo tells authorities someone pointed a gun at him and his girlfriend, forcing them into the trunk of his car in Sandoval County.

"A man just shot me and I think he's killing my girlfriend," he told authorities.

Philo said he and the woman managed to jump out of the trunk and that he was wounded but not badly.

Philo used his girlfriend's car to get down the mountain and ask a stranger for their phone to call 911. He believed his companion was likely dead.

"He shot me and I fell down, and then he chased Sara more and Sara got away a little bit, but I'm pretty sure he killed her," Philo told a dispatcher.

The female victim did not die and was able to escape before the gunman went on to take a car from another victim and head toward Kansas.

Authorities suspect the rampage began after Deaton strangled his girlfriend, Heather Robinson, 30, at her apartment in Rankin County, near Jackson, Mississippi.

Deaton is accused of driving her white SUV to nearby Neshoba County, where 69-year-old Brenda Pinter was shot to death at a church she was cleaning on Feb. 23.

Authorities say he also is suspected of wounding a jogger in Rankin County in a drive-by shooting. He is then believed to have headed west, still in Robinson's SUV.

That SUV was found in New Mexico and Deaton is believed to have then carjacked Philo and his girlfriend.