Kalkaska Murder Mystery

Two years before a downstate man was murdered in Kalkaska, a local suspect in his death was questioned in connection with a stolen car used in a fatal drive-by shooting in Detroit.  

By Patrick Sullivan | March 3, 2018

One of the suspects in a Kalkaska County murder case — one that’s been alternately described as a botched robbery or a drug deal gone wrong — also faced questions in connection with a fatal drive-by shooting in Detroit two years earlier.

Jason Morgan (above center) faces charges of open murder and armed robbery for the November 2018 shooting death of 42-year-old Brodrick Ward (above left), an Inkster man with a history of drug convictions.

Ward, who reportedly told family members that he was headed to northern Michigan for a fishing trip with Morgan, was allegedly shot and killed in an early-morning confrontation with Morgan, 35, and Terrance Jordan (above right), 36, in a rural rental house outside of Fife Lake. Jordan also faces murder and robbery charges.

Two years earlier, investigators in a Detroit homicide case questioned Morgan about a stolen car he drove downstate and lent to another man before it was used in a drive-by murder.

A Jeep Disappears
That Detroit case offers a glimpse into the bizarre and dangerous world of a drug addict.

Court documents and a police report in that case describe Morgan as a heroin addict who stole a car that was later connected to the fatal drive-by in December 2015.

That case began in Kingsley on Nov. 29, 2015 after a 33-year-old woman told police that Morgan had driven off, without permission, in a car that belonged to her boyfriend. The woman told Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s deputies that she had picked up Morgan to visit a friend’s house, and they had decided to spend the night there.

She told police that she discovered Morgan and her boyfriend’s jeep were gone when she woke up the next morning but didn’t call police immediately; she thought she might be able to find the car on her own.

The woman, who had left her cell phone in the car, used a find-a-phone app to check the location of the Jeep, the woman told police. She said the app revealed that the car was at a Super 8 Motel in Inkster and, a short while later, that it had been moved to an apartment complex in Dearborn Heights, according to the police report.

The woman said she attempted and failed to get help from motel staff and downstate authorities.

Finally, at 7:09pm, she called police in northern Michigan to report the stolen vehicle.

The investigator determined that the reason for the gap between when the Jeep was stolen and when it was reported was because the woman didn’t want to tell her boyfriend what had happened.

The investigator notes, “She wasn’t able to provide a phone number for her boyfriend and claimed that he was down in Bay City.”

“A Party-type Crowd”
The investigator quickly found a phone number for the Jeep’s owner and contacted him.

The boyfriend thought the whole story was suspicious, according to the police report. He didn’t know Morgan, he told investigators, but said that his girlfriend “does hang out with a party type crowd.”

The boyfriend told the investigator that he wanted his Jeep reported stolen.

The green 2004 Jeep Cherokee was added to the Law Enforcement Information Network as a stolen vehicle, and Inkster Police were notified.

For a few days, according to police reports, the case seems to have been put on hold.

Then on Dec. 3, someone from the Detroit Police Major Crimes Unit contacted Grand Traverse County investigators about a connection between the stolen car and a homicide. Detroit Police wanted a copy of the stolen car report.

A DPD detective said the Jeep and its license plate had been identified by a witness to a drive-by shooting.

The police report described the downstate crime: “The shooter was described as a black male wearing a hoody. … The shooter had exited the stolen vehicle and approached the subject and shot the subject who then ultimately passed away from his injuries.”

At that point, Detroit detectives had more questions for Morgan and the woman who had reported the Jeep stolen. Morgan could not be located, so Grand Traverse investigators re-interviewed the woman who made the initial report.

The woman claimed that she had taken Morgan and her two children, ages 8 and 10 years old, to the friend’s house to watch movies that evening. She said that it had gotten late and so they decided to stay the night. She denied that they had been doing drugs, according to the police report, even though she told investigators that she thought Morgan was a heroin addict. The woman maintained that she was just friends with Morgan and that nothing had happened between them. She said she’d known Morgan since elementary school.

The woman did not respond to a message from the Express seeking comment.

She told the investigator that she believed that Morgan had a girlfriend who lived in Inkster and that he’d stolen the Jeep so that he could go visit her.

In their search for Morgan, investigators also visited his parents’ home in Kingsley. Morgan’s parents didn’t know where he was; his father told the investigator that his son was a heroin addict who has been struggling “for quite some time now,” according to the police report.

His parents told investigators that if they learned of their son’s whereabouts, they’d turn him in.

On Dec. 7, the same day Detroit Police located the stolen Jeep, Morgan’s father called police to report that he had learned that his son had recently been dropped off at a hospital in Garden City in critical condition.

An Interview in Intensive Care
One week later, Morgan was charged by Grand Traverse County with unlawful driving away of a motor vehicle. He wasn’t arrested in the case until May 17, 2017, according to court records. It is unclear why there was such a long delay before his case was prosecuted.

At Morgan’s preliminary hearing in Traverse City last June, a downstate state police detective testified about how a Jeep stolen from Grand Traverse County ended up at the center of a Detroit murder investigation.

State police Det. Darrin Grandison testified that he had questioned Morgan in December 2015 while Morgan was undergoing treatment in the Garden City hospital intensive care unit following what he characterized as a “severe overdose.”

(Later in the hearing, while facing the prospect of having his bond cancelled because he’d failed to show up for drug tests, Morgan insisted to the judge that he had not suffered an overdose, but rather had been hospitalized for pneumonia, according to a transcript of the hearing.)

Grandison testified that Morgan had told him he had taken the car in Grand Traverse County, driven it downstate, and gave it to someone else.

Morgan, Grandison said, told him “that he drove down from Grand Traverse in a green Jeep, which is the vehicle in question, my suspect vehicle, from my homicide. He drove it to Inkster and, from that point, turned over the car to another subject.”

He added: “He told the other person that the car was stolen, and he [the borrower] might be able to drive it for two days.”

The man  Morgan had given the Jeep to was not named in court or in the police report.

Reached at the state police district headquarters in Detroit, Grandison said that the December 2015 homicide case remains unsolved and that he could not answer questions about an open investigation.

After the hearing, Jacob Graff, Morgan’s attorney, attempted to get Morgan’s confession to auto theft thrown out.

Graff filed a motion arguing that since Morgan had not been read his Miranda rights, his confession should not be allowed into testimony in his trial. He argued that since Morgan was in intensive care and was physically unable to go anywhere, the interview with Grandison was involuntary.

At the preliminary hearing, Graff also pointed to another snag in the case against his client: that Morgan’s friend who had reported the Jeep stolen in the first place had vanished.

The Grand Traverse County assistant prosecutor who was handling the case, Charles Hamlyn, acknowledged to District Court Judge Thomas Phillips that the woman could not be located to be served a subpoena.

Court records show that the woman was on the lam at that time — she’d been arrested for drunk driving in September 2016 and later sentenced to probation. As the stolen car case had unfolded in court, the woman disappeared, and a bench warrant was issued for her arrest.

The woman reappeared in August, after Morgan had pleaded guilty and his trial was cancelled. She was sentenced to 93 days in jail.

Prosecutors defended Morgan's confession and argued that it was admissible, but Morgan pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor before that motion was decided.

Complicated Histories Converge
Morgan was sentenced Aug. 28, 2017 to 150 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to the lessor charge of larceny between $200 and $1,000, and the auto theft charge was dismissed. With credit for time served, he was released to Community Corrections on Sept. 8. He served out the final months of his sentence on house arrest.

In the Community Corrections petition for his early release from jail, Morgan admitted that he’s struggled with cocaine and heroin addiction, and he pledged to turn his life around and to “stay working and get my driver’s license back.” He had a couple of jobs lined up, according to court documents.

But Morgan did not stay out of trouble for long.

He had been free of house arrest for just over one month when he and Jordan allegedly planned a robbery and paid an early morning visit to Ward at the rental house where Ward was staying in Kalkaska County.

Ward had come up from Inkster just days earlier and had told family that he was spooked because of racist comments that had been directed at him, according to downstate media reports in the days following his death. Ward’s family feared their loved one had been the victim of a hate crime.

That narrative got murkier when police announced the arrests of Morgan, who is white, and Jordan, who is black. Investigators emphatically pushed back against the racial narrative and said the case had to do with drugs or a robbery among people who already knew each other.

At the preliminary hearing held in Jordan’s case, detectives testified that Jordan admitted he shot Ward. Jordan was arrested for Ward’s murder at Munson Medical Center, where he was recovering from a drug overdose.

Jordan’s attorney, Thomas Seger, did not return a message seeking comment. Jordan, who is listed in court documents as a Traverse City resident, has been extradited to face felony charges in Wisconsin twice in recent years.

Morgan, who has his own lengthy criminal record that includes convictions for drugs, theft, and domestic violence, has not confessed and maintains his innocence, said his attorney, Kyle Trevas. Trevas said he otherwise did not want to comment.

While Ward’s family said last year that Ward was attempting to turn his life around, the Kalkaska murder victim was on probation at the time of his death; the probation stemmed from a 2016 conviction for resisting arrest, fleeing police, and attempted delivery of less than 50 grams of a controlled substance.

Ward’s history of felony drug convictions dates back to 1999 when he faced charges of delivery of less than 50 grams of a controlled substance, according to Michigan Department of Corrections records. He was convicted of the same charges in 2008 and 2014.

Attempts to reach Ward’s family members were unsuccessful.

Officials in northern Michigan would not comment on whether there is a link between the Kalkaska case and the 2015 Detroit murder.

Kalkaska County Prosecutor Michael Perreault said he could only comment on aspects of the case that have already been revealed in court. Sheriff Patrick Whiteford did not respond to messages seeking comment about the earlier case.

Morgan and Jordan are scheduled for status conferences in their cases March 6. They have each been held in jail in lieu of $10 million bonds and face life in prison if they are convicted.