A machete-wielding homeless man scrawled satanic messages in blood on a North Carolina sorority house and a car parked outside, authorities said.
Patrick Canter, 25, is facing charges in the late Sunday incident at East Carolina University in Greenville, where a campus cop was flagged down by someone saying there was a man with blood on his hands who appeared to be in distress, campus police told WITN.
Canter injured himself and then smeared his own blood on the front of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority house and a Jeep parked outside, ECU police Capt. Chris Sutton told the station.
Campus cops tracked down Canter just off campus and took him into custody within five minutes, university police said.
“An officer was able to identify an individual and disarm the individual without any further incident,” Sutton told the station.
Photos of the bloody messages shared on social media showed upside-down crosses, the words “there is no God” and a reference to Satan.
“I could make out, like, a couple upside-down crosses,” student Grant Miller, who lives nearby, told the station. “It said, ‘Hail Satan,’ like, written in blood, which is strange.”
Canter cut him arms and hands with the machete prior to writing the messages, Sutton told The Post.
“The whole incident is troubling and I’m certain it’s very concerning for the residents of the home, as well as their parents,” Sutton said. “But we’re pleased our officers were able to locate Mr. Canter so quickly and disarm him safely without higher levels of force. Obviously he was in some form of distress.”
Canter, who was charged with injury to real property, was being held at the Pitt County Detention Center on $1,500 bond. Jail records listed him as homeless, WITN reports.
Canter is not a current ECU student and it was not immediately clear if he had been previously enrolled there, Sutton told The Post.