MURFREESBORO—One of the two juveniles arrested on July 30 for charges of residential burglary, breaking and entering and theft of property has been charged as an adult.
Formal charges were filed against Michael T. Sullivan, 18 of Murfreesboro, August 4. Sullivan was 17 at the time of the incident.
He appeared for his formal arraignment in Pike County Circuit Court Monday where he entered a plea of not guilty. His bond was reduced to $15,000 and he is to return to court November 2.
The arrest of Sullivan and the other juvenile occurred after the Murfreesboro Police Department received a call from Effie Featherston advising them that her car, her son’s car, and her sister Jean Pollock’s house had been broken into. Murfreesboro Police Chief Randy Lamb arrived at 111 Worrel Street at about 10:40 a.m. and spoke with Featherston and her son William.
Featherston and her son told Chief Lamb that they walked across the street to check on her sister’s house at around 10:30 a.m. when they noticed that the carport gate was open and the back sliding glass door was open so they immediately called the MPD.
Chief Lamb and Effie Featherston checked her late sister Jean Pollock’s residence to assess the amount of damage and see what was missing from the house. They noticed that every room had been gone through and the TV was missing.
Contact was made with John Pollock, Jean’s grandson, to come down and look at his grandmother’s residence to better identify what had been taken from the home. He identified the missing television as a 42-inch Emerson flat screen but said that he could not tell what else was missing at the time.
Later that day Chief Lamb returned to the residence and Pollock showed him two used latex gloves and small items missing from the home that were dropped on the ground. A trail of stolen items left a trail across a cow pasture belonging to Marvin and Sheila Terrell. The Terrell’s also noticed that the gate to their pasture was open and the ramp to their trailer had been let down.
Officer Stephen Coleman, who assisted with processing the crime scene, received information by a third party that Kevin Bennett had seen the two juveniles carrying a TV and trash bag full of stuff into Nicole and Ryan Stinson’s apartment about 3:10am. Stinson gave Officer Coleman consent to search the residence where the TV was recovered along with a box of ammunition with Pollock Sales on the label.
Ryan Stinson gave the statement that the juveniles entered his apartment while he and his family were asleep and when he woke up he found a television in the apartment.
On July 30 both juveniles came to the Pike County Detention Facility with their guardians to be interviewed by Chief Lamb. The first juvenile gave a statement confessing to breaking into the residence and stealing the television, but he said that he was too messed up on medication to remember anything else.
Chief Lamb made two attempts to question Sullivan with a guardian present, but the he demanded a lawyer each time before he would talk. Eventually Sullivan gave a verbal statement saying that he and the juvenile had broken into the residence through the window and were both “messed up” on over the counter cold, cough, and congestion medicine.
