Steph Deschamps / November 14, 2020

He was arrested Thursday without incident at his home in Grand Blanc, Mich.

The US federal police announced Friday that they had ended the run of an inmate who had fled in 1971 during the funeral of his grandmother.

Leonard Moses was then serving a life sentence after his conviction in 1968 for the murder of a Pittsburgh resident, according to an FBI statement. After the assassination of the champion of the fight for civil rights Martin Luther King, riots broke out in this northeastern town and Leonard Moses threw molotov cocktails at a house with his comrades.

A reward and a dedicated number for collecting information

Its occupant, Mary Alpo, had died from the cumulative effects of her burns and pneumonia. On the occasion of his grandmother's funeral, Leonard Moses had escaped. After his escape, the young man remade his life under the name of "Paul Dickson" and worked, at least from 1999, as a pharmacist in the State of Michigan, specifies the FBI.

In 2016, the federal police relaunched their investigation, questioned his relatives again, offered a reward and set up a dedicated number to collect information about him. Despite more than 2,000 intelligence, "we have failed to locate and apprehend Leonard Moses," Michael Christman, an FBI official, told a press conference in Pittsburgh.

Arrested at his home

But earlier this year, he was arraigned and charged in Michigan as part of a separate investigation, the nature of which the FBI declined to specify. Court documents show that a Paul Dickson born in 1949 was indicted in April in that state for fraud and illegal prescribing of controlled substances.

As part of this process, his fingerprints were entered into a local computer system, and ultimately crossed with a federal database. He was arrested Thursday at his home without incident in Grand Blanc, Mich., And is expected to be transferred to Pennsylvania to "face justice," Christman said.