Following a visit to his family’s hometown of Jacksonville, North Carolina, T.D. Gribble last saw his parents on Thursday.
He added that everyone he had seen there, including the jeweler and his former karate instructor, had advised him to embrace his parents. When he got back to their Greenville home, he did just that, kissing his father’s forehead and embracing his mother.
By phone on Tuesday, 51-year-old Gribble stated, “The next time I saw them was Friday afternoon around 2 p.m., after they had been murdered.”
Pitt County Sheriff Paula Dance told reporters Monday that after arriving at his parents’ house, Griffin detained the alleged shooter, a real estate broker, at gunpoint until authorities arrived. The suspect is accused of carrying out a string of shootings in Greenville last week, including three fatal ones.
According to the sheriff’s office, David Lever, 55, was charged with three charges of murder in connection with the deaths of Enrique Reyes, 64; Paula Gribble, 76; and Anthony Tony Gribble, 80, on Friday.
No potential motive has been revealed by the authorities.
At his first court appearance on Monday, Lever, who is being jailed without bond, was assigned a capital public defender, according to Greenville’s NBC station WITN.
According to Dance, on Friday afternoon, Paula Gribble called her son to their home. Citing an ongoing investigation, she declined to explain why in an interview on Tuesday.
According to his wife, Dana Gribble, T.D. Gribble never pulled his revolver when he approached Lever after discovering his parents fatally injured. Instead, he maintained his hand on his holstered gun and told Lever to raise his hands in the air while he dialed 911.
Dana Gribble, 51, said he remained calm and pleaded with the dispatcher to send a sheriff with lights and sirens. “Please send them fast,” he said.
Dance stated that as soon as deputies came, Lever was taken into custody.
According to the sheriff’s office, retired nurse Paula Gribble and Marine Corps veteran Tony Gribble were discovered deceased.
Reyes, a retired biology professor at East Carolina University, was also discovered dead. According to Dance, he was shot dead in his home’s driveway.
According to Dance, Lever is suspected of firing at a house in his neighborhood and a gas station in two previous shootings. There were no injuries.
“A cache of weapons and ammunition was found in Lever’s home and in the van he drove between the four scenes after he was arrested,” Dance added.
According to search warrants that WITNallege was able to get on Tuesday, Lever admitted to killing his parents to T.D. Gribble at their house on Friday.
T.D. and Dana Gribble refused to talk about a potential relationship between their family and Lever, as well as the majority of the specifics of the altercation and the murders. However, the warrants reveal that once the senior Gribbles relocated to Greenville, Lever worked for them as a real estate agent, according to WITN.
According to state records, Lever was a broker-in-charge at a real estate company in Greenville when he received his license in 2004. His license was still in effect as of Tuesday.
Tuesday’s attempts to contact a company representative for comment failed.
During her nearly forty years at Coastal Carolina Community College, Dana Gribble remembered her mother-in-law as a nurse akin to Florence Nightingale, “a caregiver through and through” who progressed from nursing instructor to division chair.
In a statement, the head of the institution said, “Paula’s influence has benefited countless individuals in the health profession and beyond.” “Her commitment to her profession, her college community, and most certainly her students was, in my opinion, unsurpassed.”
According to Dana Gribble, Tony Gribble spent seven tours in Vietnam while serving in the Marine Corps’ force reconnaissance unit. He received numerous Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for combat gallantry, among other honors.
T.D. Gribble claimed that his father had grown weak in his old age due to a string of injuries.
Regarding his parents, however, he remembered that “they were exceptional people.”
“They were devoted to their loved ones. They had a strong commitment to their careers. They had a strong devotion to their church.
According to a school spokesman, Reyes retired in 2022 after serving as a biology professor at East Carolina University for 17 years. Although he lived less than half a mile away and on the same street as Lever, Dance claimed that they had no known link.
According to Dance, he was discovered dead after coming home from a nearby grocery store.
Michael Brewer, whom Reyes mentored, told WITN that his coworkers at ECU remembered him as someone who made them feel like family by organizing sushi-eating contests and taking them to new eateries in Greenville.
“He was living the life that he wanted to live,” David Chalcraft, the chair of the university’s biology department, told the station. It’s just so depressing.