A Florida teenager repeatedly stabbed his ex-girlfriend, a high school star softball player, then slit his own throat Saturday after he followed her to a restaurant where she was having dinner with her mother, police said.
Spencer Ross Pearson, 18, tracked his ex-flame, 17-year-old Madison Schemitz, to Mr. Chubby’s Wings in upscale Ponte Vedra Beach near Jacksonville.
The recent Ponte Vedra High School graduate had been stalking and harassing Schemitz since she broke up with him in April, according to an arrest warrant.
Schemitz was eating with her mother, Jackie Roge, and friend Casey Estep, when she spotted her ex seated at a nearby table.
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“They were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go,'” Estep told First Coast News of their reaction, and the trio quietly got up to pay their check. However, Pearson pursued them outside, grabbed Schemitz “by one arm and stabbed her approximately 15 times” in broad daylight in front of the eatery, the warrant alleges.
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Roge tried to intervene, and Pearson allegedly slashed her in the forehead and leg, the document said. A good Samaritan, Kennedy Armstrong, was sitting in the eatery’s parking lot when he heard screaming and rushed over to help.
“You see two girls in trouble getting attacked by a guy, I would hope most people would do the same,” Armstrong told the local news station. “Kudos to the mom. I think she’s the real reason that girl is still alive.”
Pearson turned the knife on himself and “sliced his own throat several times telling witnesses he was attempting to kill himself,” the warrant said.
The alleged perpetrator and the three victims were taken by ambulance to nearby hospitals for serious injuries. Schemitz was stabbed in the back and suffered damage to her spinal cord, which left her temporarily paralyzed, her family told the local outlet.
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“Madison is a fighter, you know. She’s going to make it through this, and I know she is going to walk out of this hospital,” said her eldest sibling Tatiana Cruceta. The Ponte Vedra High School senior has undergone multiple surgeries, and her mother had surgery for a ruptured artery in her hand, Cruceta said.
Armstrong suffered severe injuries to his right hand, including an artery and several ligaments, which required surgery.
A GoFundMe page for Schemitz has raised more than $107,000 as of Wednesday. Pearson is charged with two counts of first-degree attempted premeditated murder and one count of aggravated battery. He remains in the hospital in critical condition.
