Career Criminal Accused Of Terrorizing OKC Neighborhood

An Oklahoma City man is accused of terrorizing a neighborhood in the middle of the morning.

Police say the suspect threatened to kill one woman, and even held a knife on one of her neighbors. Fortunately police were able to take him into custody before he hurt anyone else.

Police identify that man as 54-year-old Phillip Smith. Right now he is behind bars at the Oklahoma County Jail and it turns out he's a career criminal who's even been accused of murder. News9 talked with one woman who says she came face to face with him Thursday morning during his crime spree.

"And he said ‘Give me your vehicle and keys or I'm going to kill you,'" said Dawn Wilke.

Wilke says Smith threatened her life outside this home on SW 28th St. She says she was just walking through her yard after she heard a car crash, and thinks he snuck in through a hole in her fence.

"I felt like my heart stopped because I never expected anybody to be sitting right there in the property," said Wilke. "I didn't even see him."

As it turns out, Phillip Smith was the one in that crash, and police say he was driving a stolen car. Wilke says after he confronted her, he took off running down the street, and somehow broke into Gustovo Belmon's brother's home.

"He [told] these guys to give me the money, give me the money, give me the keys for the truck and he [wanted] to steal it," said Belmon.

Belmon says Smith even put a knife to his brother's back. All this took place in broad daylight, just before 9 a.m. Thursday. And police say that actually helped them track Smith down.

"People saw where he went and that's how officers ended up at the residence where he was inside with a knife," said MSgt. Gary Knight with the Oklahoma City Police Dept.

As it turns out, Smith has spent time in prison for a laundry list of charges and he was even charged with murder for a deadly robbery back in 1998, but a jury found him not guilty at trial. It does not look like Smith will be getting out anytime soon. He's being held on a $374,000 bond.