New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
All week Orange County Sheriff’s Office deputies made several visits to the same Orlando apartment complex based on reports of a “suspicious man,” one report of a man allegedly choking a woman and telling her “I’m going to get the devil out of you.” and another report of a man running around the parking lot screaming at residents and harassing them.
Deputies responded on Thursday to a report of a “suspicious person displaying hostile, erratic behavior” in the apartment complex only to find the same man behind the earlier incidents earlier, 37-year old Arthur Creese, running around naked and screaming while peering into vehicles. Police stated that he was “possibly under the influence of unknown drugs, or suffering from a mental illness episode.” Creese was reportedly not renting an apartment there but was staying with another person, 32-year-old Turquoise Raegina Samuel.
Deputies concerned about Creese’s mental health and possible drug use took him into custody and sent him to a nearby hospital. Police then returned to the specific apartment he was staying at to interview the tenant Turquoise Samuel. Police discovered blood all over the apartment door and the manager of the complex assisted in unlocking the residence and getting the police inside.
Once inside they saw blood all over the living room, a bloody sheet covering an unknown mass, a pair of dismembered hands on the dining room table, and a foot nailed to the floor. When deputies lifted the sheet they made a gruesome discovery: the partially dismembered body of Turquoise Raegina Samuel whose chest had been cut open.
Police interviewed Creese at the hospital, matched an impression of his feet with the bloody footprints at the apartment and arrested him for the first-degree murder of Samuel.
An interview of Samuel’s neighbors had revealed that they had called numerous times over Creese’s behavior and on the night before the alleged murder had heard a woman screaming, but no one had called 911.
