By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The man accused of slaying a woman in Hopewell Township in April was indicted last week on murder and related charges.
Brian Sheppard was charged July 19 in a five-count indictment with killing Laura Perez, 37, on April 25 and eluding law enforcement during a high-speed chase through parts of Mercer County on April 27. The Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office has not disclosed, publicly, why Perez, of Trenton, was with Sheppard, 53. He allegedly had “brought” the Trenton woman to the house on Washington Crossing-Pennington Road, where he was a renter, before her death, the Prosecutor’s Office has said.
The Prosecutor’s Office has said the owner of the residence, Anthony L. Olswfski Jr., had alerted township police that he had returned home from work April 25 to find his black Chevy Silverado missing and Sheppard, his roommate, nowhere to be found and unreachable. Responding law enforcement found the woman’s dead body inside Sheppard’s bedroom, the prosecutor’s office said.
She died of “blunt force trauma to the head,” the Prosecutor’s Office has said. In the indictment, Sheppard is charged with possessing a hammer “to use it unlawfully against” Perez.
On April 27, Sheppard was spotted in the Silverado by police in Hamilton, but he led law enforcement on a high-speed chase into Lawrence and West Windsor townships, only for law enforcement to give up the pursuit given how fast and dangerous he allegedly was traveling, the Prosecutor’s Office said. He was arrested April 28, in Hamilton, and remains held in the Mercer County Correction Center, the Prosecutor’s Office has said.
He does not have a court date scheduled, court records records showed as of Friday.
As for Olswfski, he died May 9 of injuries he had suffered May 2 in a roughly 30-foot fall into an electrical vault at the Rutgers Biomedical and Health Services Newark campus, where he was working for Lighton Industries. He was 49.
