Authorities in Florida, Georgia and Washington State helped confirm the identities of Cedric Frierson, 40, and Daeva Frierson, 47, who were being held on $10,000 bail each in the Bergen County Jail this morning.
Frierson told detectives that he’d been on the run from his father, a convicted bank robber captured by FBI agents outside a Lyndhurst hotel following a string of 1996 holdups. He said he believed his father “was looking for retribution,” Police Chief Benjamin Ramos told CLIFFVIEW PILOT this morning.
Ramos said his officers were called late yesterday afternoon by a Hertz investigator trying to track down a 2015 Cadillac Escalade 40 days overdue after being rented out of California.
The investigator pinged the vehicle’s location through a tracking device to a Brinkerhoff Avenue address, where officers found the vehicle in a parking garage, the chief said.
Detective Shawn Lee said he spoke with Cedric Frierson, who identified himself as Thomas Yearwood and “requested that we speak to him away from his apartment because he did not want to alarm his two children,” ages 13 and 14.
He also claimed that he was from Colorado and was holding the vehicle for a friend who’d rented it, the detective said.
Lee told him that a computer check on his driver’s license came back as not on file, then asked him repeatedly whether it was legitimate and what address it bore, Ramos told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Frierson/Yearwood “all of sudden became extremely nervous and could nt give a response, stating that he was simply nervous about the whole ideal,” the chief said.
After asking for other ID and getting a membership card with the name that was on the California rental agreement, Lee warned Frierson that he faced arrest.
At that point, Frierson admitted his true identity, Ramos said.
After having him empty his pockets, Lee spotted a New York driver’s license with Frierson’s photo — and yet another name.
Frierson then said “he had name legally changed because he was on the run from his father, Jerome Frierson-Bey, who[m] he had to testify against for bank robberies he had committed,” Lee reported.
Frierson-Bey, who’d been convicted of the 1990 robbery of a Newark bank was awaiting sentencing on kidnapping, carjacking and armed robbery convictions when he and a fellow inmate escaped a Georgia jail in 1996. The two then committed a string of bank holdups that drew headlines from New Jersey to the Carolinas.
FBI agents captured Frierson-Bey as he sat in a car outside a Lyndhurt hotel in April of that year after “America’s Most Wanted” featured him on one of its programs. He was carrying a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol and two loaded magazines, they said.
Frierson-Bey’s attorney at the time told the govermment that he was afraid for his own life after two close relatives were slain in New Jersey and South Carolina.
Police yesterday learned that Cedric Frierson actually had four of his children with him in the Palisades Park apartment. They included two adults — 20 and 21 — who’d taken the Yearwood name, Ramos said.
Lee also found Frierson’s wife hiding in a closet, he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Like her husband, she couldn’t repeat the address on her Colorado driver’s license, the chief said.
She also had a New York driver’s license with a different name, as well, he said.
A computer check at police headquarters after the Friersons were taken into custody turned up warrants for both of them out of Florida and Georgia and for Daeva Frierson out of Washington, Ramos said.
“The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office (GA) confirmed the suspects via driver’s license photos and Orange County (FL) sent mugs shots of the suspects,” the chief said.
Both also requested detainers on the couple should they make bail.
Palisades Park police charged both with hindering arrest and being fugitives from justice.
MUGSHOTS: Courtesy BERGEN COUNTY SHERIFF
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