Ex-wife of suspect called police to Abingdon Panera Bread before deputies were shot

The ex-wife of a man who fatally shot two Harford County deputies called police to alert them to his presence at a Panera Bread in Abingdon before they responded to the scene Wednesday, her sister said.

David Brian Evans' ex-wife called police to report that she had spotted him at the restaurant just before lunch time Wednesday, said Patty Sullivan, whose sister, Elizabeth, is Evans' ex-wife. Sullivan believes Evans had shot her sister in 1998 but had never been caught by authorities.

"He was on the run," Sullivan said. "This was the first time she had seen him in the area."

Sullivan said her sister feared for her family, who lived only walking distance away from the Panera.

Evans, the only suspect named by Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler in the fatal shooting of two deputies, died at the scene.

Police were familiar with Evans in Harford County, but Gahler did not go into detail Wednesday.

Jeremie Evans, 38, is Evans' oldest son but said he has not had a relationship with his father in 20 years because his father was abusive toward him and his mother.

"He had a history of violence so none of this is shocking to me," Evans said outside his Towson home Thursday.

The family had previously alerted law enforcement that his father was in the area. About a month before Wednesday's deadly shooting, he said his younger brother also saw their father in the restaurant and called police, but that they were directed to the department's warrant section and their father wasn't arrested.

Evans said witness accounts made it sound as if the officers were responding to a homeless person, rather than an armed man.

"I feel like they went in there unprepared," Jeremie Evans said of the two slain deputies.

He said he believes the officers were not given information about how dangerous his father was.

"Harford County let these guys down," he said. The two officers killed "paid the ultimate price. They are heroes."

Evans said he was thankful that no one else inside the restaurant was injured, and is relieved that his father can no longer hurt his family.

He said his mother told him about the shooting, but he did not immediately learn his father had died. He said he immediately worried his father would flee to harm his family and he was headed to pick up his 16-year-old daughter from school.

He said his father served in the Army for several years before he was honorably discharged and earned a master's degree in engineering from the University of Maryland through an advanced program.

The family had moved to Georgia in the 1990s when his parents got a divorce, Evans said. His mother returned to the Baltimore area to be close to family, while his father relocated to Florida where he married another woman.

But in the late 1990s he said his father came back to Maryland, but did not speak to the family and stalked his mother.

"He followed her back here," he said.

In 1997 or 1998, he said his mother was leaving for work New Year's Eve and as she was walking to her car she was struck in the neck by a bullet. He said he believes his father was the shooter but he was never charged because he said police did not have any witnesses in the case. Evans said he remembers seeing his father sitting outside the family's home, watching them.

A Florida woman connected to Evans through court and property records said she only knew him vaguely.

Despite the family's claims of violence, David Evans has no criminal record in Maryland. In Florida he had an open criminal case stemming from a traffic incident.

In April 2015, police in Maitland, Fla. encountered Evans sleeping in a Ford Taurus in a parking lot. It looked to the officer as though Evans had been living in the car — "trash everywhere, dirty clothes on the seats, and a strong odor of body sweat," the officer wrote in a report.

As the officer questioned Evans he began fumbling around for his keys and he sped off, according to the report. Evans fled at 70 mph and police broke off the pursuit.

He was charged with several traffic offenses, but never showed up for court, according to online records.

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