April 02, 2022
A 32 year old tattoo artist named Nicholas Brent Gibson was arrested earlier this month in New York, in connection with the murder of his ex-roommate.
Gibson was approached and detained by transit officers at a subway station in the East Village at around 9:30AM, where he was arrested for the murder of 77 year old Erik Stoker who had been killed in Florida several days earlier. The officers had received a wanted poster featuring the heavily tattooed man and recognized him instantly. Police believe the 32 year old was on the run at the time, but do not know where he was planning to go.
The murder
Alerted by an odor so foul that it was impossible to ignore, Stoker's neighbors went to investigate his home, a ground floor apartment in South beach, Florida. There they discovered his decomposing body and a scene that they could only describe as “gory”. Police estimated that his remains had been there for at least over a week by the time they found him and said it was clear that the victim had been hacked at and stabbed with a large sharp instrument, that was later identified as a samurai sword. His credit cards and cash were missing from his wallet and transactions made on the account lead investigators right to Nicolas Gibson. After killing his ex-roommate with the sword, Gibson fled to New York on a long haul bus using the victim’s stolen credit card to purchase the tickets. Through a series of credit card transactions they followed him to the city where they finally noticed him getting off a subway train and made the arrest. Police believe that Stoker likely allowed the 32 year old man to stay with him after a stint in jail, and that he may even have been assisting the retired stockbroker with daily living before he killed and mutilated the elderly man.
When asked if he murdered 77 year old Erik Stoker, Brent answered: “Yes, with my bare hands. With a big sword. He wanted to go.”
Gibson has a long history of arrests and convictions, all of which are for rapes, sexual assaults and multiple counts of failing to register as a sex offender.
His criminal history goes back decades to when he was just 13 years old. He was convicted of rape in Illinois in the summer of 2000 and was punished with seven years detention at a juvenile prison.
After completing his sentence he went on to reoffend and was charged with the rape and assault of a minor in Pennsylvania in late December of 2007. It was also discovered that he had neglected to register as a sex offender and was sentenced to another 4 years in prison as a result. This pattern would continue to repeat as Gibson continued to reoffend and refuse to register himself across multiple states and counties.
After being released again in early February of 2013 he was arrested another 5 times over several years for failure to register, accumulating an extra 5 years of jail time in total.
After being arrested for killing ex-roommate, Gibson began confessing to multiple murders statewide and told police that he was a serial killer who had been killing since he was just 12 years old. He claimed to have bludgeoned a homeless black male to death with a loose brick in 1999 in a wooded area in Kennesaw, Atlanta where he used to live. He also claimed that he took the life of another victim in the same area, a male adolescent with special needs whom he claimed he threw into a body of water.
The killings, he alleged, stopped when he was arrested for rape in 2000 and was subsequently sentenced to seven years in prison. He told investigators that he went on to kill two more men upon his release, a Caucasian Russian male in Tampa, Florida and an African American male in California. Police are investigating the claims and attempting to connect the confessions to any cold cases that fit the timeline.
The killer also told police that he had drowned a woman in Biscayne Bay, Florida in 2015. Investigators originally believed that he may have been describing the murder of 27 year old Finnish tourist, Essi Puhakka, whose body was found floating in the bay in February of 2015. Although the murders sound similar, according to Gibson’s police record he would have been serving time in Unadilla, Georgia at the time. Police are looking into Nicholas Gibson’s claims in an attempt to figure out if they are disingenuous and attention seeking stories or legitimate confessions.
So far, Nicholas Brent Gibson, or “Brent Savage” as he likes to call himself, has confessed to 32 murders and despite not being from New Zealand, has been talking to officers with an accent. Brent, who is a single dad, split up with his girlfriend in 2016, a year later she died and his mental health was said to decline. He may also have started using drugs.
Many people had taken him in over the years, including a nurse at mental health facility who said she asked him to leave after several days due to the unnerving nature of his conversations and the discovery that he had been twice convicted for rape.
More details to be released as the police continue their investigation.
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