Sheriff Greg Champagne scheduled an 11 a.m. news conference to discuss the incident. The suspect’s ex-wife and her mother were also both at home.
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The sheriff said Canada was wounded during a tour of duty in Afghanistan and sought treatment for an addiction to oxycodone, which he began using as a result of head injuries he suffered from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Her 59-year-old father chose to arm himself and sleep in the front room.
Champagne said Canada’s wife of two years filed for divorce about ten days ago.
Canada is charged with three counts of attempted first degree murder. The st Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office says William Canada, 30, is now in jail after the shooting in the Ashton Plantation subdivision. But in recent weeks, he said, he had spotted only Canada’s truck coming and going.
Gunshots rang out early Tuesday morning in a Luling subdivision.
A St. Bernard deputy who knows Canada reportedly called him, at which point Canada said he was on Bourbon Street. Canada was taken to the corrections facility in St. Charles Parish.
St. Bernard officials told the estranged wife and her family about Canada’s location.
The shooting was reported around 4 a.m. Tuesday at a home in the 100 block of Lac Verret Drive. The woman was already asleep, according to Champagne, when Canada texted her, “bye-bye, a-holes”.
“At the scene Canada had left, we believe, two cans of either gasoline or some type of accelerant. and a makeshift Molotov cocktail”. Champagne said there was no verbal encounter, but that apparently Canada saw his father-in-law moving in the front room and he began firing before he fled. But because of the incendiary devices that Canada had with him, Champagne said, investigators are operating under the assumption that he planned to set the house on fire.
Deputies searched the couple’s residence on Lake Carolyn Drive out of an “abundance of caution” because of information that Canada had explosives training, Champagne said.
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Monday night she was contacted by the sheriff’s office saying that Canada was acted strangely when he contacted a woman in Chalmette who purchased his old house.
