Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Teen boy unleashes BULLET-HELL on mom, dad & sister, kills 6. (part 2)

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

A 17-year-old is accused of the deaths of six people after an Indianapolis shooting. Police were sent to the scene after a wounded boy was found at another location. He tells police that the suspect "killed everyone." One of the victims was a 19-year-old mom-to-be.Nancy Grace and Joe Scott Morgan, Professor of Forensics Jacksonville State University, take a closer look at the forensics at the murder scene. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Hi, guys, Nancy Grace here. In light of the mass murders in Indianapolis, we are doing an extra round of Q&A focusing specifically on forensics and the crime scene. As many of you legal eagles know by now, multiple victims were shot inside a home

on the east side of Indianapolis, one of the worst mass murders in Indianapolis history. The victim's 42-year-old mother, Kezi Childs, her husband, the father of the children, also 42, Raymond Childs, Jr., their 18-year-old son, Elijah Childs, their 13-year-old daughter, Rita Childs, a 19-year-old young woman, almost 20, Kiara Hawkins, and unborn baby boy due to be born in about four weeks. Also, a teen boy, the younger boy in the home, just 15 years old, is in critical condition in the hospital right now. To Joseph Scott Morgan, kindly joining me, professor of forensics, Jacksonville State University, author, TV star. Joe Scott, when I say TV star, you got there because of all of the training.

I'm talking about literally thousands of death scenes that you have investigated. I know from the investigation into the Atlanta Fulton County courthouse shooting and an earlier mass murder I prosecuted to, let me say, process the crime scene can take days and days. Yeah, it can. And Nancy, you have to think about this as a mindset when you go into this environment as an investigator. You're walking into an environment that for the average citizen is total chaos. And that's the framework that you come from because you're human as an investigator. But you have to set that aside and you have to order. I refer to it as ordering your brain, if you will, and compartmentalizing what you have to do. Because when you look at this, it's almost as if someone took a jigsaw puzzle of several thousand pieces and literally just threw it up in the air at random. The only problem is that jigsaw puzzle is saturated with blood and other evidence. And you have to make

sense of that. Because at that moment in time, when you cross that threshold into this hellscape, you only get to walk across the threshold for the first time once. You can't back out of it. There's no way to get it right the next time. You have to get it right. So even before you walk into this environment, you were talking about the courthouse. I had friends over there as you did. I know, or if you think about the buckhead shooting that we had many years ago in Atlanta, you walk into these environments and you have to be well planned and ready to rock and roll when you walk through the door and be totally focused because it's so easy to be distracted. Hey, it's easy to be distracted on a regular homicide case. But can you imagine when you're surrounded

by tons and tons of evidence, not to mention the horror of these destroyed lives. And you have to take it step by step. It's almost, I teach my students that it's like walking through a minefield. You assume that every step that you take going forward in the future with this particular case has the potential to destroy the case. So you have to be very careful as to how you're going to handle each one of these individuals and break it down piece by piece because Nancy, they're deceased at this point. They're not going anywhere. And many times, you know, the public will look at this and say, how can you do this?

How can you stay there for days and days and days in this environment? Maybe why are you leaving these bodies in there? I can't tell you how many times I've heard that over the course of my career. The reality is this. Obviously, the body is not going to be there forever. People are very uncomfortable with death, but you have to process this as carefully and methodically as you possibly can at that one moment, because the public's right. The body needs to be removed and it will be removed, but not until we're complete with everything that we have to do to document what brought about the end of this magnitude dealing with all the blood, blood spatter, blood drops, blood spray, transfer marks.

What cops are trying to do, forensic CSI right now, is to determine, since there was no eyewitness to the sequence of the shootings, apparently the 15-year-old little brother was downstairs in a basement. They can learn that. They can learn exactly what happened if the scene is not destroyed and if somebody who knows what they're doing goes in first. I mean, you can't move anybody. You can't walk through blood. I know this sequence. I know

that the 15-year-old brother was downstairs. He heard the 13-year-old sister upstairs, Rita, scream out, he's shooting everybody. So I know she's not the first dead body. All of this is very important, by the way, if the state plans to go forward with intentional murder. For intentional murder, you have to show premeditation. Premeditation, of course, can be proven in the blink of an eye, the twinkling of an instant, and the time it takes you to raise a gun and pull this trigger, that's time to form premeditation under our current jurisprudence. So the fact that the shooter goes room to room methodically shooting his family, and yes, we believe the 17-year-old son angry angry at the dad, is the shooter, according to police.

But did he go through the home methodically? Was there time between each shooting for him to form mens rea, premeditation? That's what they're looking for. They're looking to see if he first acted in self-defense. Did the father go after him? Doesn't seem like it, but did he? Apparently, all the victims were unarmed. These are just a few of the things that forensics will be trying to determine.

And every spatter, drop, smear will be important. I know at the Atlanta-Fulton County courthouse shooting, there were multiple victims. It literally took days, days, where the victims were left as they were for a period of time so the sequence of events could be determined and all of the forensic evidence kept pristine, as it were. Explain, Joseph Scott Morgan. Yeah, you know, this is the marriage of what you do as a prosecutor, Nancy, and what I do as a forensic scientist. And you can tell a tale and the evidence will do that. Let's talk about blood just for a second. When you talk about blood evidence and blood

staining that is left behind it will give you an indication just to kind of frame this a little bit it gives you an indication of relationship and i'm talking about physical relationship in that moment of this violence like how what what kind of distance are we talking about? We can talk about physical relationships. Was the perpetrator, say for instance, in an asymmetric position where they are literally above, say for instance, the victim where they're firing down? And that will tell a specific tale. Did he make contact, for instance, with the body after he fired this high velocity round into the body? Say, for instance, to bludgeon them with a weapon after they do this to make sure they're dead. And then as he withdraws the weapon, you might have a passive mark on the bottom of the weapon.

You might have a drip that kind of free falls and then you can track that away. So this gives you an idea and it goes to sequencing too doesn't it you know because you're thinking about as chaotic as this is did he actually you know if we assume and this is a big assumption you are the parents specifically the father the primary target well is that the location that that he went to. If the dad is in bed, remember this happened in the wee hours of the night. If the dad was in bed, then that means that he was shot. He was in repose, if you will, say he's laying face up and the shooter fires down into his body. Well, there's not going to be a lot of blood tracking away from that. But after that initial gunshot goes off, there's an awareness. Remember what you said,

the 13-year-old said, he's shooting, he's shooting us. So that means the dynamics of this thing change. As she's fleeing, let's assume she is, out of her room to get away. Remember, she said he is shooting. She identified somebody. We know it's a male. Well, if she's running away from the sound, he fires at her down a hallway. Well, maybe as he's fired at her, she. The shooter still threw open the door and shot them down through the top of their head, if you will, to render them dead. At that point, in that same environment, I had people that were shot multiple times laying in puddles of blood, but you could still track where their bare feet, because this case happened in the middle of the night I'm talking about, where their bare feet had tracked through the blood of their own siblings to try to get away, but they just didn't make it. So the blood element here is going to be very important because this is going to tie back to the specific dynamics of the event. How did this go down?

Did it go down in real time? And what, can we put this in real time? Can we sequence this? And that's going to be important because when that information, that scientific information comes back to the prosecutor and you're standing, you're standing before the jury, you want to be able to paint that picture. And forensics many times gives the prosecutor that ability to tell this tale through the biological evidence of actually what happened. And it's very, very powerful, too, particularly when you can illustrate it with an image in court and you can demonstrate what was seen at the at the crime scene. And then you can further enhance it by putting an expert on the stand and say, why don't you go into this a little bit deeper to tell the people of the jury precisely what happened.

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. So when the crime scene tech, CSI, goes into this scene, what's the first thing they're going to do besides hopefully keep everybody else the hay out? Yeah, well, the most solid thing that we have, Nancy, in crime scene observation is initially there are going to be a myriad of photographs that are taken. That is after the scene is secured and the initial kind of walkthrough is conducted, we call it a walkthrough. In this case, you would not want to completely walk through because there's going to be copious amounts of blood everywhere. You're going to take overall photographs. Well, the first thing they're going to do is put on footies and full CSI gear so they can put their tread marks off their shoes onto the crime scene. Yeah, and you're right about that.

There's a great image if you look back at the O.J. Simpson case where you've got Dennis, I think the guy's name is Dennis Fong. I can't remember specifically, but the criminal is from L.A. County. He's at the scene and he's wearing what we refer to as a bunny suit, one of these Tyvek suits. He's walking down the sidewalk carrying bags of evidence. And then you have the detective standing over there and they're in their street shoes and they're in the same environment. What's the point? Everybody has to be suited up because that is a transfer of evidence. Everything that you bring, you bring everything from the environment you

pre-existed in prior to arriving at the scene into that environment. And so you have to be very careful. You have to put shoe covers on. Preferably, you have to put a the scene into that environment. And so you have to be very careful. You have to put shoe covers on. Preferably, you have to put a Tyvek suit on. You have to cover your hair. We lose hair every day. We lose skin cells every day. You have to have gloves on in order to protect against any kind of trace evidence that you're

going to contaminate the scene with. And it makes it particularly difficult when you're processing the scene. You're sweating. You get lightheaded. That's where it's saying you can't hydrate because you can't bring water into this environment. And you don't want to keep coming and going out of the scene because that ups the risk. So you better be prepared when you walk in into this environment because you have to protect, literally have to protect the scene from yourself as an investigator. How long do you think the processing will take? I mean, we've got an eyewitness. We've got an eyewitness.

But remember, the eyewitness that we think we have is the little brother of who we believe right now is the perp. Name has not been released because he's juvenile. Who knows what will happen by time of trial? He may feel loyalty to his brother and totally recant. I mean, we don't know what's going to happen. That is why the crime scene texts are so important that this crime scene be preserved in its natural state before it can be ruined by people touching things, breathing on things, dropping their hair and their fibers all over everything. You have to be able to corroborate everything this little boy is going to say or not say.

He may not even testify. So the case may have to be proven based on forensics alone. Yeah. And Nancy, I want you to keep this in mind and listen to what I'm saying very carefully here. I'm glad that they have a quote unquote eyewitness. But that's something that the detective will deal with and they'll question this kid. They better question him on video. But right now he's still in critical condition in the hospital.

Yeah, he is. And any kind of information they can extricate from this young man is going to help. However, as a crime scene technician at the scene, I don't care if it's a suicide. I am going to work that scene as if I have no eyewitnesses. That should be my working assumption at all times, that there is a potential for this thing to go forward. I don't know what other information is. And as a matter of fact, the less information I have coming in at that moment in time, it's a distraction to me because I want to keep my mind as pristine as possible when I'm looking at the evidence before me.

That way it's not influenced at all by crosstalk or, you know, any kind of supposition that's out there that the police might be doing on their own. I want to focus on the body itself. I get one shot at doing this, Nancy. So anything that makes me intellectually lazy at the scene, I have to be able to laser focus on all of the bloodstain that's left behind, all of the spatter. I have to be able to focus on the distribution of, say, for instance,

the brass casings that come out of this firearm. I have to be able to appreciate the injuries and document those injuries and talk about what precisely happened. Hey, I even have to focus on the condition of the body relative to, say, the postmortem interval, because I don't know. I don't know. This kid may have, he may have killed these people in way in advance. And then all of a sudden, something happened to trigger this thing. Maybe two or three of these people were dead before, you know, the young kid ran out of the house and they'd been dead for hours. I don't

know that because I wasn't there. My working assumption at that point in time is that I'm ignorant of all facts other than the body that I have before me. And at the end, the product that I produce as a forensic scientist, from that scene, it's going to be all the more pure because I'm not influenced by all the chatter that's going along and that sort of thing. I make sure that I collect all the hair evidence. I collect and document through photography and measurements all of the blood evidence, the spatter, the dynamics of this thing.

You know, you said that you measure, and that's so important. I recall my elected DA calling me down to his office. Of course, I ran down the stairs, didn't wait on an elevator. And a longtime friend of his who was now at that time a partner in one of the biggest law firms in Atlanta, daughter had ostensibly committed suicide. Well, the dad, Mr. Slayton's friend, did not believe it was suicide. So I went straight out to the scene and I took with me the medical examiner investigators in a lot of metropolitan cities. The ME, Medical Examiner's Office, has their own investigators in addition to homicide investigators and detectives. They met me and they brought their notes and they had taken

very careful measurements. The woman was found, may God rest her soul, in bed, naked, shot in the head. This is just one example. And they had measured to the inch, the half inch, the millimeter, how far away the spent shells were, the brass as you call it, to determine, help determine, did she actually commit suicide and were the shell casings where they should have been in that event? My point is every shell casing is measured against a fixed object such as the wall, against other objects such as the body, the foot of the body, the head of the body. All of these measurements can somehow amazingly turn out to be critical evidence at trial. Joe Scott.

Yeah, they can be, Nancy. And by the way, she did not commit suicide. Well, that's that's the important part here, because and just going to this point alone, you know, if you think about deaths, if you go in with a basic base assumption that just because some uniformed cop tells you when you show up at the scene that this is a suicide of self-inflicted, I assume they're lying. I don't believe. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Don't trash the uniforms, OK? They're just going on what they see and what they think at that moment. They're not experts like you. Yeah, exactly.

And because they're not. Give the people some respect, man. Hey, man, listen, just because. Yeah. And that is my point precisely, Nancy. They need to keep their mouth shut at that point in time because. Yeah, you know, because everything they say is going to end up in a police report and say you get to trial and you're prosecuting a homicide. And they go, well, wait a minute.

The defense says, wait a minute. Even when you're uniformed, this was a suicide, didn't he? Even though the cops said that's what it looked like, but didn't know that. So, yes. Yeah. And you look at this and you're working assumption, every working assumption is that every case, and I mean every case, even if it's an 80-year-old mama that's got, you know, a long history of heart disease and these sorts of things, your working assumption is that this is a

homicide because you can't, you know, and this is an old legal term, you can't unring the bell at that point. You can't go back and get a do-over. So relationship, say for instance, in the case that you're commenting on, the relationship of say a spent casing, that's going to be very critical. You have to think about the physical science of it. Is it possible, depending upon the weapon and the actual spent brass, is it possible, depending upon the weapon and the actual spent brass, is it possible that that piece of brass would have ejected in that manner to wind up in that location relative to the body? Now, if the brass is all the way across the room,

okay, and you've got someone that's laying there with a weapon maybe immediately adjacent to their hand or loosely clutched, you know, my spotty senses are going to go off that point. Tom's saying this just doesn't look right. And is there a powder burn? You know, most people, for instance, if you look at a suicide case and people don't realize, Nancy, you know, in death investigation, we work almost two times more suicides than we do homicides because it's just the nature of it.

You just don't hear about them unless it's a famous person. But with suicides, say, for instance, with gunshot wounds, most of the time, if it's a self-inflicted gunshot wound, say, for instance, to the side of the head, we're going to have what's referred to as a press contact gunshot wound. That means that the end of that muzzle will be tightly pressed against the skin. And there will be very little, say for instance, stippling around the injury because it's all encapsulated. It's all sealed. So everything out of the end of that barrel blasts into the head.

Now let's flip that around. If you have someone that is shot, say for instance, with the same type of weapon and it's fired at a distance, which is atypical for suicide, and you have a powder distribution, that's going to give you an idea that this is not probably a self-inflicted wound or the chances are very slim that it would be because it fits out. Hey, hey, hey, we're getting in the weeds because you know what? This was not suicide. This was not self-inflicted.

This was not suicide. This was not self-inflicted. This was mass murder. With me, Joseph Scott Morgan, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University, author of Blood Beneath My Feet on Amazon. We wait as justice unfolds. Nancy Grace signing off with our Crime Stories bonus podcast. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.