![]() The killing touched off an existential panic about whether the tacit promise of a place like Edmond was still intact. ![]() Its population was wealthy, and more than 85 per cent white. It was one of numerous similar suburbs across the country, where numerous people moved en masse as cities were legally mandated to become racially integrated following the mid-century victories of the civil rights movement. To understand the crackling current of fear that ran through the Julius Jones case, you have to understand Edmond, Oklahoma, the suburb where the killing took place, and the swaggering prosecutors who sought to avenge it. The community wanted resolution, and the prosecutors who depended on their votes each election wanted death. Whoever placed the gun in the red bandanna and stashed it at the house, once it was found, police had a more-than-plausible conviction. I completely understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. “Certainly, from my client’s position, it’s another way to spin the story to try to deflect responsibility. “It didn’t happen,” Mr Bock told The Independent. Mr Jordan, through his attorney Billy Bock, denied any sort of framing took place. It didn’t matter that investigators’ case-making information came from a group of men with a vested interest, and an easy avenue, of avoiding police scrutiny. It didn’t seem to matter that the night after the murder, Chris Jordan asked to sleep over at the Jones house for the first time, where he slept in a bedroom near where the murder weapon was found, and that Julius’s family saw him seeming to skulk around upstairs. ![]() It didn’t seem to matter that Julius’s prints weren’t found in the car. It didn’t seem to matter that days before the murder, Julius had been photographed, during a mugshot for doing donuts in an empty parking lot, with buzzed short hair, not the kind of cornrows Chris Jordan had at the time, that would have stuck out from under a skull cap. Inside, in a crawl space, they found a gun matching the murder weapon, wrapped in a red bandanna. Officers surrounded the Jones family home, hauling out Julius’s relatives at gunpoint and tearing through the house. Once police had Julius’s name, they began charging towards a resolution. “I had never had really bad encounters with the police until the evening where they came to my house and they pulled a gun on me for the first time.” “I was under the understanding that the police were going to do their job and their job was to make sure that people were safe,” she continued. They traded information with officers in lenient charges or a tacit license to operate unimpeded. The owner of the shop, Kermit Lottie, and Ladell King, known to police as a prolific dealer in stolen cars, were both professional informants for Oklahoma police. Two days after Paul Howell was killed, police located his GMC Suburban in a parking lot near a known chop shop, which dismantled cars of dubious origin and sold them for parts. Their paths would soon diverge once again: Chris would take a deal from prosecutors to avoid the death penalty in the Howell shooting and testify against Julius, and his old basketball buddy would head to death row. He liked helping people, after all, and he needed the money, too. Jordan, who had a car, would give Julius rides, and Julius had talked about taking his college entrance ACT test for him in exchange for money. They’d known each other from school and basketball, but Jordan never graduated and became affiliated with gang members, while Julius went off to university. That summer, he reconnected with an acquaintance named Chris Jordan. But just because I broke the law does not make me a murderer.” And I’m not trying to hide from anybody that I broke the law, because I have. I stole things that I could sell,” he said from a jailhouse phone in the 2018 ABC documentary series The Last Defense, which detailed his case. “Being young, just wanting to have money, I got into shoplifting.
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