By Mark Scolforo
Associated Press
YORK, Pa. — A municipal official and former police officer on the run to escape rape charges in Maryland and Pennsylvania killed himself Monday morning in upstate New York as law enforcement closed in.
Michael L. Johnson Jr., 40, shot himself in the chest and head inside a boarding house in Cohoes, N.Y., 10 miles north of Albany, authorities said.
He had been missing since Dec. 9, when he failed to turn himself in to face charges in two rapes that occurred in York in September. Rape and kidnapping charges against him also were pending in Baltimore for a Nov. 2 attack on a 21-year-old woman.
Stan Rebert, the York County district attorney, said that Johnson could have spent decades in prison on the Pennsylvania cases alone.
“You just don’t know what people are capable of doing,” Rebert said. “There is justice in the sense that he will no longer be able to do that to anyone.”
Authorities said they had tracked Johnson from Pennsylvania to Burlington, Vt., and Troy, N.Y., before catching up to him in Cohoes. Johnson encountered police preparing to arrest him around 10:30 a.m. and ran back into his second-floor room at a boarding house, U.S. Marshal Michael Regan said. The shots were heard a short time later, Regan said.
Johnson’s Pennsylvania defense lawyer, Christopher Ferro, said Johnson deserved the presumption of innocence because none of the charges had gone before a judge or jury.
“There are no winners in this story,” Ferro said. “At the end of the day, regardless of what is written and said, children have lost a father and a wife has lost a husband. Michael Johnson died today with a presumption of innocence that, in reality, means very little to a person who, in a short period of time, lost everything and was publicly vilified.”
Investigators said the vehicle in which Johnson was last seen, a Chevy Cobalt, has not been located. They are looking into whether anyone helped him during the nearly two weeks he spent on the lam.
Johnson had been a member of the York City Police Department for four years until he resigned in 1999 due to injury. He was still a member of the Penn Township Board of Commissioners near Hanover, where his duties included oversight of the local police department, though he stood to lose the elected position if convicted.
In the Baltimore rape, Johnson was accused of telling the victim that he was arresting her for prostitution, then handcuffing her to the back seat of a van and raping her. She was able to provide critical clues that helped detectives trace the vehicle.
The York victims, ages 42 and 34, were both drug-addicted prostitutes, according to court papers. Johnson allegedly told both women he was a police officer, although his stint on the police force ended nine years earlier.
Police searches of the minivan he was using turned up handcuffs, two police badges and condoms.
“We got our man,” said Rebert, the prosecutor. “Unfortunately, he took his own life in the process. You have to believe his conscience was weighing on him.”