Lake Charles, LA – As a Louisiana state trooper lay bleeding on the ground while a man rifled through his pockets and tried to grab his handgun, motorist Robert LeDoux was waved down by bystanders who warned him not to get any closer.
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It was too dangerous, they said; the man had a gun of his own. LeDoux ignored them.
As he approached, the suspect told him, “‘Everything’s all right. Mind your own business. You need to go,'” LeDoux told The Associated Press a day later in an exclusive interview. “All I could see was pure evil in his eyes.”
LeDoux ignored the suspect’s warning as well: “I took off running,” he said. “I tackled him. We hit the ground. I was on top of him and I called 911.”
The man whom LeDoux is credited with apprehending is now charged in the death of Senior Trooper Steven Vincent.
Kevin Daigle, 53, is accused of shooting Vincent on Sunday evening after Vincent found Daigle’s truck in a ditch and stopped to offer assistance. Vincent died Monday.
At a jailhouse hearing Tuesday, a state district judge assigned Daigle to a public defender. The nonprofit Baton Rouge Capital Conflict Office will handle Daigle’s defense, sheriff’s spokeswoman Kim Myers said.
Daigle was “a good person until he started drinking,” said Diane Daigle, whose husband, Michael, is one of Kevin Daigle’s four brothers and two sisters. She said he’s been in and out of jail for the past decade, in chronic pain from past ankle and hip injuries, and “troubled.”
He needed help for problems but got very little, she said.
LeDoux said he was out for a drive Sunday when he saw flashing police lights about a quarter-mile ahead. Three men stopped him and urged him to turn around. They said they were calling 911, but that he shouldn’t approach the patrol car because they had seen a man brandishing a gun beside the trooper.
After LeDoux tackled the gunman, the other men ran over to help. They handcuffed the shooter and two of them held him down while LeDoux went to help Vincent, using the trooper’s radio to call for assistance.
LeDoux said it wasn’t until he saw the trooper’s name tag that he realized he knew the officer because he was good friends with the officer’s brother, also in law enforcement.
Police introduced LeDoux at a news conference earlier Monday but he did not speak to reporters at the time.
Authorities also suspect Daigle in the death of another man, 54-year-old Blake L. Brewer, whose body was found Monday at a Moss Bluff house where Daigle had been living.
Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Tony Mancuso said authorities originally went to the house Sunday evening because the truck Daigle was driving was registered there. No one answered and they had no search warrant, so they left, he said.
But on Monday, Brewer’s office called authorities to say he had not shown up for work and asked police to check on him.
As authorities were on their way to the house, state police also passed along information from their interview with Daigle that “led investigators to believe an altercation occurred between him and Brewer which led to Brewer’s death,” the sheriff’s office said Tuesday.
Upon arrival, a sheriff’s deputy found Brewer dead and signs of a struggle.
Authorities have not charged Daigle in Brewer’s death. They have charged him with first-degree murder in the trooper’s slaying. But they are still trying to figure out what triggered him. Daigle had a record and was known to authorities already.
“He’s a citizen that has a criminal history in our community,” Mancuso said. “Everything from some battery charges, some domestic issues, battery on a police officer, DWIs. It’s somebody we’ve dealt with before.”
The police have not released the dashboard video, but state police chief Mike Edmonson described what he saw on it: Vincent, a 13-year state police veteran in southwest Louisiana and member of a law enforcement family, trying to talk the man out of the truck. Instead, the man came out with a shotgun.
“It was frightening to watch,” Edmonson said.
He said the tape shows a shotgun blast, and then Daigle wandering over to Vincent to ask him if he was still alive.
“You could hear him breathing, telling him, ‘You’re lucky. You’re lucky — you’re going to die soon.’ That’s the words that came out of his mouth,” Edmonson said.
The police suspect Daigle had been drinking and said another type of drug was in his system, but gave no further details.
Vincent leaves behind a wife, Katherine, and a 9-year-old son, Ethan. The trooper’s funeral will be held Saturday at a Catholic church in Lake Charles, with burial in the nearby community of Lacassine, state police announced Tuesday.
Vincent came from a law enforcement family. One of his brothers was a police chief in Iowa, Louisiana, and another brother is a state trooper. He was a marathon runner who just the night before ran a marathon for fun, Edmonson said.
“Nobody wore this badge more proudly than Steven Vincent,” Edmonson said. The chief called LeDoux a hero when he introduced him at the news conference Monday.
But LeDoux shied away from that label, saying he simply did what many others might do. He also repeatedly praised the three men who returned to help him.
“A hero saves somebody’s life, and in the end I couldn’t,” LeDoux said, getting choked up as he spoke about knowing the Vincent family.
But when pushed, he acknowledged he helped catch a killer: “I’m the reason we caught him, and I’m the reason (Trooper Vincent’s) able to donate his organs. That doesn’t make me a hero. That just makes me a good person.”