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A north-eastern Pennsylvania school district opened with tightened security on Monday after the suspect in a deadly police ambush was believed to have been spotted near one of its campuses.
A woman out for a walk on Friday night spotted a rifle-toting man with a mud-covered face near Pocono Mountain East high school in Swiftwater. State police believe the man was Eric Frein, who has eluded capture despite an intense manhunt in the Pocono Mountains.
The high school and all other schools in the Pocono Mountain school district were open on Monday.
Additional officers from the Pocono Mountain regional police department were stationed at the district’s Swiftwater campus to supplement the lone police officer who normally patrols that location, which, in addition to the high school, includes a junior high and elementary school.
Police spent Sunday scouring the area around the school, but left the decision on opening up to district officials. Several area schools were closed last month in the early days of the manhunt.
Frein is charged in connection with the 12 September shooting that killed Corporal Bryon Dickson and wounded Trooper Alex Douglass, who was transferred from a hospital to a rehabilitation facility on Friday.
Investigators said the “surprise encounter” took place shortly after 9pm on Friday, and the man was about 15 to 20 feet from the woman, just off the road where she was walking.
“He had actually turned towards me and that’s where you could tell the mud on his face, you could tell the height he was based on the truck he was standing next to,” she told ABC on Sunday.
“You could clearly tell it was a gun, a rifle with a scope attached to it. It looked as though he was looking for something or looking which way to go.”
“In this particular case, this was a very close-up sighting,” Lieutenant Colonel George Bivens of the state police said at a news briefing alongside Governor Tom Corbett on Saturday. “The individual that reported it had great detail, and so our investigators believe that this was likely Frein.”
Frein is described by police as a survivalist with a grudge against law enforcement. Police said they have already found two pipe bombs, one discarded rifle, ammunition, food, clothes and other supplies, along with a journal Bivens previously said contains a “cold-blooded and absolutely chilling account” of the shooting.
Meanwhile, state police official told PennLive that authorities could learn as soon as Monday whether blood found on two area porches on Thursday belongs to Frein.
Pennsylvania state police did not recommend that schools close, a district spokeswoman, Wendy Frable, said.
“We would not bring the students in if we did not have reassurance from police they felt the campus was safe,” she said on Monday.
The district will not have attendance figures until Monday afternoon, but expects that some students will have stayed home, she said.
