Caballero has been charged with second-degree murder.
Caballero is suspected to have fled the state on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City, but the Montpelier Police Department and Vermont State Police say it’s possible he may have never left Vermont.
Police allege that Caballero shot Austin around 4:30 a.m. Sunday outside his apartment on Barre Street in Montpelier before fleeing the scene by car. Caballero allegedly knew the 33-year-old victim.
Caballero
The alleged shooter has been convicted of at least one prior felony, police said Monday afternoon, and, as a result, Caballero was not legally permitted to own a firearm. It is unclear whether Caballero owned the 9 mm handgun used in the shooting, according to Major Glenn Hall of the Vermont State Police and Montpelier police chief Anthony Facos.
Police on Monday morning executed a search warrant at the home where Caballero lives with his girlfriend, 22-year-old Barre resident Desiree Cary, Hall said.
Authorities had been watching Cary for some time, Hall said.
“She was the target of an ongoing investigation by the drug task force,” Hall said. Officers have in the past purchased drugs from her as part of a police action.
Caballero is thought to have left the state on a Greyhound bus with multiple stops in Massachusetts and Connecticut en route to New York City. Caballero may have disembarked at any of those stops, Hall said.
“We’re pretty confident he did board that bus; how far he got is unknown,” Hall said. “There’s a possibility he is in Vermont at this time, despite all the information I just talked about.”
The shooting happened after “an altercation” involving multiple people outside Gusto’s, a bar in Barre, police said. During the exchange, Austin allegedly struck Cary, Hall said.
Police have talked with witnesses at the scene, Hall said, and they do not believe the incident to be drug-related. Hall declined to say whether the shooter acted alone.
Police took Cary into custody Sunday night and arraigned her Monday morning. She is currently lodged at the correctional center in South Burlington. Cary has been charged with selling crack cocaine and heroin. Bail has been set at $500,000.
Austin had worked as a mental health specialist at the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital since May 2015, according to Tom Cheney, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Human Resources.
Austin was the first player on the semi-professional basketball team, the Vermont Frost Heaves.
“Clearly the star” on his high school basketball team, according to a report in the New York Times, Austin led the White Plains Tigers to a New York State championship in 1999.
Austin played forward for the Tigers, in spite of a 6’6” frame that was unusually tall for high-schoolers in that position, said former White Plains Journal News reporter, and current Boston Globe reporter, Pete Abraham.
“You don’t see a lot of guys that tall handle the ball as well as he could,” Abraham said.
“It was a very competitive league he was in, and his team wasn’t as good as some of the others, but he’d make them better,” Abraham said.
Austin’s high school playing won him a scholarship to Eastern Michigan, where he played basketball with the Eagles until graduating in 2005.
The following year Austin came to Vermont.
“Markus was the first player we signed,” said former Vermont Frost Heaves founder and Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff. “It was a big deal when we added him to the roster.”
Austin remained with the team through two championship seasons (2006-2007 and 2007-2008), and through to the premature end of the team’s final season in 2009.
“He was an incredibly hard worker,” Wolff said. “He had a real combative spirit — I think people knew, when Markus was on the court, nobody was going to trifle with us.”
Former associate head coach Wayne Lafley described Austin as “a lunch-pail kind of guy, who brought his hard-hat every day to work.”
Austin was good at passing and defense and rebounded well from the wing position, Lafley said. He also worked well with teammates. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody with anything negative to say about Markus Austin,” he said.
“He was a quiet, unassuming guy with a sense of humor where, if you spent any time with him at all, he’d make you have a smile on your face,” Lafley said. “He was a team-first kind of guy.
Caballero appears to have had a history of run-ins with police. Records from Florida show a Jayveon Caballero with the same name and birth date who was charged with several counts of battery in 2009 in Daytona Beach.
Caballero recorded a number of rap songs and released them several years ago on the Internet, under the name BloodBath. “I’m so official with a pistol, when I start gunning I’ll never miss, so you better start running,” Caballero riffs in one of his songs, titled “Statement.”
The shooting death was the first murder in Montpelier since the 1920s, when a woman shot and killed her husband on State Street, Facos said.
Witnesses or anyone with information is urged to contact police.
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