By Mensah M. Dean
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — After all was said and done — the robbing of a bank and the slaying of a police officer — getaway driver Eric Deshann Floyd was left with nothing but guilt and remorse.
“I thought it was just gonna be a bank job. Taking a life changes everything, but especially a cop,” Floyd told police on May 8, 2008 - five days after Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski was gunned down on a Port Richmond street.
“I just want to make it clear that I am remorseful and that no matter how much I apologize or say I’m sorry, I know it’s not gonna change the fact that it happened, and I know it’s not gonna give a wife back her husband or kids back their father,” Floyd’s statement continued.
Homicide Detective Thorsten Lucke yesterday read the eight-page statement to the Common Pleas jury that will decide the fates of Floyd, 35, and co-defendant Levon T. Warner, 41.
If the jury finds them guilty of first-degree murder in the slaying of Liczbinski, Assistant District Attorney Jude Conroy will ask for the death penalty.
Floyd told police that he had a bad feeling about robbing the Port Richmond ShopRite and had asked to abort the mission, but that he had been overruled by Howard Cain, 34, and Warner, whom he referred to in the statement as “the other guy.”
After robbing the bank and fleeing in the getaway Jeep, Floyd said, he noticed Liczbinski in the rearview mirror.
“I see him, and he was like, ‘OK, I’m right here.’ Like, ‘All right, guys, enough is enough.’ ”
At that point, Floyd said, he proposed that he stop the Jeep and the three get out and run.
But Floyd said that he decided not to get out because Liczbinski was getting out of his car and was close to him.
When Cain exited the front passenger-side door, Floyd said, he thought that Cain was going to run, but he quickly learned otherwise.
“So then I see the officer, like, talking, he’s, like, saying, ‘Hold it, don’t do it,’ or ‘You don’t want to do that’ - something to that effect ... That’s when I heard the shots and, like, I seen the officer, like, go down.”
After Cain shot Liczbinski and got back into the Jeep, Floyd said he asked him, “What happened, what’d you do that for?”
“Drive, drive,” he said Cain responded. Later that day, police killed Cain and arrested Warner. Floyd was arrested five days later in an abandoned Southwest Philadelphia rowhouse where he was hiding out with his girlfriend.
“I want to say that what happened to the sergeant/officer was something that was never intended or was supposed to happen, and I didn’t see it coming and when it happened, I was horrified,” Floyd told police.
“The officer was just doing his job, and I don’t fault him for that. He had a job to do, and I just wanted to run.”
Testimony is expected to continue through this week and possibly into the next.
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