2018-01-21 08:00:00
By John Simerman and Matt Sledge
The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.
NEW ORLEANS – Justin Matthew Payne hoped to be among the New Orleans Police Department’s best and brightest.
The fact that he applied at all suggests that he was not one.
Payne’s application in October to become a New Orleans police officer led to his arrest by Chicago police this week on suspicion of murder in the Windy City, NOPD spokesman Beau Tidwell confirmed Friday.
Payne, 26, is suspected of killing trucking company owner Luis Peña, 64, in December 2016, although Chicago police did not issue a warrant for his arrest when he applied to the NOPD to close, a police source said.
Payne’s previous jobs included driving a truck, and the Chicago police soon learned of his policing aspirations through a former employer.
“Detectives with Chicago PD contacted NOPD to verify address and phone number for Payne,” Tidwell said in an email. “The Chicago PD notified NOPD that Payne was a suspect in a homicide.”
On Wednesday, NOPD investigators called Payne to police headquarters under the pretext that they needed him to complete more paperwork. Chicago detectives then walked into the room and confronted him.
A Chicago police detective told Peña’s family Thursday that Payne confessed to the killing, said 19-year-old Karina Peña, one of the victim’s seven children.
Tidwell confirmed that Payne “confessed to killing his former supervisor at the trucking company where he worked before coming to New Orleans.”
Detectives then took Payne from NOPD headquarters to the jail and booked him on an arrest warrant for first degree murder.
Karina Peña said Chicago detectives told the family they thought Payne fled to Georgia before landing in New Orleans.
She said her father fired Payne as a truck driver about five weeks before the killing, which took place in a trailer at Luis Peña’s truck yard on Chicago’s Southwest Side.
Authorities in Chicago initially said Peña had been shot, but the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded after an autopsy that he had been physically assaulted.
“He worked so little (time) for my father. My dad fired him for being lazy,” Karina Peña said of Payne.
A mechanic at the truck yard identified Payne in a video from the crime scene, she said. But more than a year later, she said, the family had despaired that her father’s murder would ever be solved.
“To be honest, everyone felt that not much was being done. People started to lose hope,” she said. “I’m happy because just the fact that he confessed is a good confirmation that it was him. We’re not worried that we’ve been chasing the wrong guy all along.”
When they called the family Thursday, Chicago police did not mention that Payne had applied to carry a gun and badge in New Orleans, she said.
“What? Really? Wow, that’s crazy!” Karina Peña said.
A spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department declined to comment on Payne’s arrest and referred questions to the NOPD.
Payne was being held without bail Friday in the Orleans Parish jail pending an extradition hearing scheduled for Monday.
His arrest was something of a good news story for the police department’s selection process for officer applicants, which came under heavy criticism in a January 2017 report from the federal monitors overseeing the department’s reform process.
The monitors then said that recruiters were far too eager to hire applicants with red flags such as drug use and prior arrests.
©2018 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.
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