DALLAS — A Louisiana TikTok star with millions of followers on multiple TikTok accounts is in the Dallas County Jail held without bond after a fugitive task force investigating a Baton Rouge murder followed him all the way to a park bench in downtown Dallas.
Twenty-year-old Terryon Thomas, who goes by the moniker "Mr. Prada" on TikTok, was sought by authorities in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana after an encounter with Baton Rouge Police.
Police there say he was driving a black Lincoln MKZ which had been reported stolen. Baton Rouge Police say the driver, later identified as Thomas, refused to exit the vehicle and backed into the officer's marked patrol unit and drove away. Police then found the vehicle abandoned in a parking lot.
Police say the vehicle Thomas was driving belonged to William Nicholas Abraham, 69, a therapist in Baton Rouge who made regular appearances on the ABC TV station there. His body had been found Sunday morning wrapped in a tarp alongside Highway 51 in Tangipahoa Parish. Police say he was viciously beaten to death.
"We got a call from a passerby Sunday morning and that's the first time our deceased hit our radar," said Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Gerald Sticker.
"My sister calls me and said it was imperative that I called her back and I did. And I was pretty much, I guess, in shock," Joseph Abraham said of learning of his brother's murder.
Surveillance video released in Louisiana by the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's Office identified Terryon Thomas as the last person seen with Abraham.
Sources tell WFAA that a tip from someone who knows Thomas led them to downtown Dallas Tuesday night where he was arrested without incident.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Terryon Thomas was charged with aggravated criminal damage to property, resisting arrest, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and ordered held without bond in the Dallas County Jail pending transfer back to Louisiana.
The East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, which is in charge of the death investigation, is not yet saying if Thomas will also be charged with murder.