First responders on the scene of an apartment fire and reported attack 40th and Hamilton Streets.
POSTED: SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2016 12:00 AM |UPDATED: 10:40 AM, SAT MAY 7, 2016.
Carla Evans and Arthur Gray said they could see the horror unfold Friday morning in unit 9E of an apartment building across from their own.
A young man was beating and slashing the face of an older man in a second-floor apartment near 42nd and Hamilton Streets, they said. “He’s throwing gas on us! He’s throwing gas on us!” a woman screamed. “He’s going to burn the place down!”
Evans, 34, and her fiancé, Gray, 35, yelled across to the younger man to stop the attack. They told him the police were coming up the steps.
The assailant, they said, kept repeating, “Today’s a good day to die.”
Police on Friday night said the victim, Steven C. Edwards, 48, died at Creighton University Medical Center after about six hours of efforts to save him.
Whether he died from stab wounds or from burns from a fire that erupted was not clear, police said.
The suspect in the homicide, the seventh in the city this year, is Antone Page, 32, police said. Page assaulted Edwards and pulled him into apartment 9E just before officers arrived, police said.
Page was burned and was taken by helicopter to St. Elizabeth Regional Burn and Wound Center in Lincoln.
The attack, in a unit of the Walnut Hills Apartments at 4153 Hamilton St., began about 7:30 a.m.
The woman in the apartment escaped, and the younger man shut the front door behind her before officers arrived, Evans and Gray said.
Through the apartment’s window, Evans and Gray said they could see the young man light something that was sticking out of a jar. He threw it on the couch in the apartment, they said, and the couch went up in flames.
Police tried to break in the door, Evans said, but the young man kept pushing it closed. Finally, she said, an officer fired shots at the lock on the door to get in. The officer fired four rounds, police said.
By this time, Evans said, the apartment was in flames.
Page appeared in the doorway and an officer fired a stun gun, police said. Page was pulled out of the doorway and struggled with officers as he was handcuffed.
Police dragged both men from the burning apartment, Evans said, and firefighters entered the unit and doused the flames in less than 10 minutes.
Neither Page nor Edwards was struck by the officer’s gunfire, police said.
The woman suffered minor injuries and was taken to Creighton, said Omaha Fire Battalion Chief Tim McCaw.
The fire, he said, was confined mostly to the unit, which is in the east building in the complex, across from the building where Evans and Gray live.
Police did not release the name of the officer who fired his handgun. He was placed on paid administrative leave while an investigation is underway.
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