ESTACADA, Ore. — A man carrying what appeared to be a human head walked into a grocery store in Oregon and stabbed an employee just minutes before authorities discovered a woman’s body in a home in a nearby town.
The two incidents were connected, authorities said.
The man entered the Thriftway grocery store covered in blood and with “what looked like a large kitchen type of knife,” Ernie Roberts, interim police chief in nearby Sandy, Oregon, said Monday in a phone interview. Sandy provides police services for Estacada, which has just 2,600 residents.
He was also carrying something that appeared to be a severed human head, Clackamas County Sheriff’s Sgt. Nate Thompson said.
“He didn’t say anything after he was subdued,” Roberts said, adding that at one point before he was arrested the man told someone he was thirsty. “He was in like a catatonic state, wasn’t speaking to anybody. That’s why he was transported to the hospital.”
Soon after the attack, someone called 911 to report that a woman’s body was found at a home in Colton, a short drive south of Estacada.
Police did not say if the body was decapitated. Authorities were conducting an autopsy on the woman Monday and did not immediately release her identity.
The suspect and the stabbed grocery store employee have both been hospitalized. Both are expected to survive.
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