BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- – A man has been charged with giving false information to authorities investigating the killings of two graduate students at Louisiana State University, police said Thursday.
Police said Dallas Joseph Staden, 22, called authorities anonymously on Dec. 17 and said he had direct knowledge about the killings and named several possible suspects, including himself.
"Thousands of man-hours were spent over the next week by detectives, analysts, crime lab technicians, patrol officers, tactical teams, administrators and others from multiple law enforcement agencies attempting to verify this information," Baton Rouge Police Department Sgt. Don Kelly said in a statement.
Staden, of Baton Rouge, was arrested on Dec. 21 on an unrelated warrant and remains in East Baton Rouge Parish prison, Kelly said. He was charged with criminal mischief, and authorities said they didn't know why he made the call.
It was not immediately clear who was representing Staden.
Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma, 31, a biology student, and Kiran Kumar Allam, 33, a chemistry student, both from India were found shot in the head Dec. 13. Police said they were killed in a home invasion at a student apartment complex on the edge of campus.
Authorities are searching for at least three men, and possibly four, as their chief suspects in the slayings.
In the days after the killings, police released sketches of two men seen in the apartment complex where the students were murdered and a description of an older model, light-colored Oldsmobile believed to be the getaway car. Kelly said that information was developed from different sources and didn't involve the phone call from Staden.
"The vehicle, the sketches, all that's still very valid. All of that came from other sources, and all of that came before this phone call," Kelly said in an interview.
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