Suspect in UNT student’s killing transported from Arizona to Denton

The Marine corporal accused of fatally shooting a University of North Texas student was booked into Denton County Jail early Thursday morning.

Eric Jamal Johnson, 20, was transported by Denton County sheriff deputies from Yuma, Ariz., to Denton, and he arrived at 2:54 a.m., said Officer Shane Kizer, a Denton police spokesman. A judge set his bail at $1 million.

“He was cooperative during his transport,” Kizer said.

Johnson, arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service Jan. 5 outside the gate of the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, is facing a murder charge in the New Year’s Day killing of Sara Mutschlechner, 20.

Johnson has an Arizona address as well as a Texas ID and a Fort Worth address, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Mutschlechner, a junior at UNT from Martindale outside of San Marcos, was shot once in the head about 2 a.m. New Year’s Day while she was driving a car with three passengers in the 1700 block of North Elm Street in Denton. They had been at a New Year’s Eve party, police said.

Witnesses said the gunman was the driver of a dark-color SUV with five or six men inside that pulled up beside Mutschlechner’s sedan.

A man with the Twitter handle Santana Sage — later identified as Johnson — was identified by witnesses as the SUV driver, according to the affidavit

Before the shooting — and as the two vehicles were stopped at the intersection of North Elm and University Drive — the men in the SUV made derogatory comments of a sexual nature toward women in Mutschlechner’s car, the affidavit said. A man in Mutschlechner’s car threatened to fight the men in the SUV and that’s when the driver of the SUV threatened the occupants of Mutschlechner’s car with a black semiautomatic handgun, witnesses told investigators.

A clerk at a nearby gas station, who was standing outside, heard two shots and saw a dark-color SUV speed away as Mutschlechner’s car crashed into another vehicle and then a telephone pole, the affidavit says.

Police traced Johnson by locating video surveillance footage from the gas station and several other businesses, as well as tracing posts made on social media sites, Kizer said.

The Marine Corps said Johnson is assigned to the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron-1. Capt. Justin Smith, a spokesman for the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command in California, told The Associated Press that Johnson joined the Marines in August 2013. He said Johnson is an administrative specialist and has never been deployed.

This story was originally published January 21, 2016 at 9:38 AM with the headline "Suspect in UNT student’s killing transported from Arizona to Denton."