The preliminary hearing of a Bensalem teenager accused of shooting and killing a 13-year-old girl and then using an Instagram video call to ask for help in covering up the crime ended abruptly on Monday after the suspect's lawyer said his client felt ill.
On Black Friday of last year, Joshua Cooper, 17, sent an Instagram video chat to a teenage acquaintance in which he said he’d accidentally killed somebody before flipping the video and showing the legs and feet of someone covered in blood, the Bensalem Township Police Department said.
Cooper is charged as an adult with criminal homicide, possessing instruments of crime and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence.
During Monday’s preliminary hearing for Cooper, two Bensalem Police Officers who initially responded to the incident, said they saw evidence of the crime scene being cleaned up.
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The officers also described the 13-year-old girl lying face down on the floor in the bathroom. At that point, Cooper’s lawyer, Paul Lang, told the judge his client was feeling ill. He then consulted with Cooper’s family before telling the judge his client wanted to waive his hearing.
“It’s a complicated, evolving and ever-changing case when you have juveniles of any sort,” Lang said.
A criminal complaint said police officers learned of the crime after a mother called them around 4:11 p.m. on Nov. 25, 2022, to tell them that Cooper had not only sent the Instagram video to her daughter, but also repeatedly texted her, pleading for her help to dispose of the body.
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Officers tracked Cooper down to his home on Gibson Road in Bensalem, at which point he ran out the back and into the woods, according to the complaint. The officers then entered the home and found the victim dead from a gunshot wound to the back/neck area.
Cooper was found by officers on a nearby wooded path, at which time he allegedly told them he was "sorry" and that he's "going to jail for the rest of [his] life."
During an interview after he was captured, Cooper told detectives that he got the gun while cleaning and organizing his father’s safe, investigators said. The teen accessed the safe while replacing the batteries that his dad had removed, making the safe’s combination lock inoperable, according to the criminal complaint.
Cooper allegedly told police that he and the victim, who arrived at his home after he’d finished cleaning the safe, had been in a relationship in the past. The two watched Netflix for a while, after which the girl went up to go to the bathroom, where she was later found dead.
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The evidence “indicated that substantial steps had been taken to clean up the crime scene, including the cleaning of a large amount of blood,” the police complaint said.
Cooper told police that although he would normally escort the victim to the bathroom, he didn't this time. Then, the teen's mom cut off the interview, the complaint says.
Police have not released a motive for the crime, or how they believe the victim and suspect originally met.
NBC10's Deanna Durante learned that the 13-year-old girl lived with relatives in Jenkintown, and it was one of those relatives who dropped her off at the Bensalem trailer home the day of her death. The victim was a seventh-grader who had only been enrolled in a Montgomery County school district one day before she died, sources said.
Bensalem school officials said Cooper attended a cyber charter program and was not physically inside school buildings. Neighbor Charlie Petri said the teen didn't work, as medications he was prescribed kept him from having a job.
Since Cooper and his father moved in about a few months prior to the girl's death, neighbors said they'd seen him quietly walking around fairly often.
"I talked to the boy out here on the bench a couple times 'cause he seemed troubled," Petri said. He added he had seen the boy and his dad openly carrying guns in their backyard, so when Petri heard the gunshot and saw the boy running, he wasn't too alarmed.
"I didn't think much about that, at that time, because that's not the first time since he's lived here that he's done that," Petri said.
Cooper will return to court next week.
Investigators still have not publicly identified the victim.
