Suspect in MN teacher's death arrested after 4-month manhunt
More than four months after Liz Quackenbush was stabbed to death in her New Orleans home, authorities say they've caught her killer.
Preston Higgs, 36, was reportedly arrested in Indiana on Friday.
Quackenbush was killed on March 3, with police identifying Higgs as the suspect a couple days later. Authorities tracked him to Iowa, resulting in concerns that he might have been headed to Minnesota — where both he and Quackenbush grew up.
The pair had dated in their native Rochester before moving to New Orleans together. The Rochester Post-Bulletin detailed the pair's local ties, with Quakenbush having been an instructor at the Rochester Alternative Learning Center (ALC) — and making the news several times over the years for her work with the Green Thumb Initiative at the ALC, which "focused on teaching real-world skills through gardening, grant-writing and beekeeping."
The paper says Higgs had a criminal record, having been convicted over a 2003 incident in which he assisted in an armed robbery at a Minnesota gas station and then "forced his way into a pregnant woman's car at gunpoint" and sexually assaulted her. He was released from prison in 2018.
Nola.com reports that Higgs was ultimately found on a Greyhound bus in Lake County, Indiana, where he is now awaiting extradition to New Orleans.
Per the news site, U.S. marshals say Higgs received help in the form of financial support from "immediate family and friends" while he was on the run, prolonging the search for him — meaning "those associates could be charged" with harboring and abetting a fugitive and making false statements to authorities."
