Beginning with a gunshot, ending in 127-characters; a tweet from the Pennsylvania State Police ended a nightmare 48-hour, nationwide pursuit for Steve Stephens.
Stephens published video on Facebook of him shooting a randomly chosen victim walking down the street, Robert Godwin Sr., then fleeing the scene. As authorities worked to locate Stephens, the community was on edge.
In other videos posted to his Facebook account, Stephens claimed he murdered 15 other people and would kill again.
Photos of Stephens flashed on digital billboards — from Connecticut to California — asking anyone with information about Stephens’ whereabouts to call the FBI.
The massive manhunt ended in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a self-inflicted gunshot. The community breathed a sigh of relief with a succinct tweet from Pennsylvania State Police at 11:46 a.m.
It’s not the first tweet to mark the closing of a police manhunt.
Authorities brought Boston to a standstill for four days as they searched for the Tsarnaev brothers, perpetrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
The two final nights of the intense search saw a hail of bullets exchanged between police and the suspects. When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev emerged from the back of a boat in Watertown, Massachusetts, police let Bostonians know they were safe.
Bomb blasts and gunfire echoed throughout Paris in November 2015, unearthing an ISIS terror cell spanning two continents, leading all the way back to Syria.
Investigators tracked down the perpetrators and their support network and began to uncover Abdelhamid Abaaoud’s centrality to the attack; he was the cell’s mastermind and ringleader.
When the dust settled in St. Denis, Abaaoud was dead along with five others. Five days after shots rang out at the Bataclan, the French Interior Ministry tweeted out the police action was over.
Paris, once again, was at peace.