T.D. Gribble saw his parents for the last time on Thursday, after taking a trip to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where his family is from.
He said that everyone he met there, including the jeweler and his old karate teacher, told him to hug and kiss his parents when he got back to their home in Greenville.
“The next time I saw them was around 2 p.m. on Friday, after they were killed,” Gribble, 51, said on the phone Tuesday.
Pitt County Sheriff Paula Dance told reporters Monday that when Gribble got to his parents’ house, he held the suspected shooter at gunpoint until the police came. The suspect was a real estate broker who is suspected of killing three people in a series of shootings across Greenville last week.
A 55-year-old man named David Lever was charged with three counts of murder in the deaths of Anthony “Tony” Gribble, 80, Paula Gribble, 76, and Enrique Reyes, 64, on Friday.
The police haven’t said what the possible motivation was.
Lever is being held without bail, and NBC station WITN of Greenville reported that he was given a capital public defender when he went to court for the first time on Monday.
Dance said that on Friday afternoon, Paula Gribble called her son to come over. In an interview on Tuesday, she wouldn’t say why, saying that a probe was still going on.
Dana Gribble, T.D. Gribble’s wife told NBC News that when he confronted Lever about his parent’s deaths, Gribble never pulled out his gun, but he did keep his hand on his holstered gun and tell Lever to put his hands up while he called 911.
Dana Gribble, 51, said, “He kept his cool and begged the dispatcher to send a sheriff with lights and sirens.” “Please send them quickly,” he said.
Dance said that as soon as the deputies came, Lever was arrested.
The sheriff’s office said that Tony Gribble, who was in the Marine Corps, and Paula Gribble, who was a nurse, were found dead.
Reyes, who used to teach biology at East Carolina University and had retired, was also found dead. Dance said that he was shot and killed in the yard of his house.
Firearms were also used by Lever at a gas station and a house in his neighborhood, according to Dance. It didn’t hurt anyone.
Dance said that when Lever was caught, police found a stash of weapons and ammunition in his home and in the van he used to get between the four scenes.
Search warrants that WITN got on Tuesday say that Lever told T.D. Gribble that he killed his parents at their home on Friday and admitted to doing it.
T.D. and Dana Gribble wouldn’t talk about most of the facts of the fight and the killings, and they also wouldn’t talk about a possible link between Lever and their family. WITN reports that the warrants show Lever worked as a real estate agent for the older Gribbles after they moved to Greenville.
The state records show that Lever got his license in 2004 and was the head of a real estate company in Greenville. His license was still valid as of Tuesday.
On Tuesday, attempts to get in touch with someone at the company for information failed.
In Dana Gribble’s memory, her mother-in-law was a nurse like Florence Nightingale. She was “a caregiver through and through” and worked at Coastal Carolina Community College for almost forty years, rising from nursing teacher to division chair.
“Many people in the health field and beyond have been helped by Paula’s influence,” the president of the school said in a statement. “Her commitment to her profession, her college community, and most certainly her students was, in my opinion, unsurpassed.”
Dana Gribble said that Tony Gribble had been in the Marine Corps and did seven tours in Vietnam in a force reconnaissance unit. Among the awards he received were a Bronze Star for bravery in battle and several Purple Hearts.
T.D. Gribble said that his father was weak because he had been hurt many times.
He said of his parents, “They were exceptional people.”
“They cared about their family.” They cared deeply about their jobs. They cared about their church.
Someone from East Carolina University said that Reyes left in 2022 after 17 years as a biology professor there. He lived on the same street as Lever, which was less than a half-mile away, but Dance said that they were not known to be related.
Dance said that he was found dead when he got home from the food store.
People who worked with him at ECU remembered him as someone who made them feel like family by holding sushi-eating contests and taking them to new places in Greenville, Michael Brewer, who was Reyes’s mentor, told WITN.
The head of the biology department at the university, David Chalcraft, told the station, “He was living the life he wanted to live.” It’s sad.”
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