Guilty For Double Murder 11 Year Old Spent 9 years locked Up Before They Figure "Lacking Evidence"
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| Jordan with his dad while dad visits him at Juvenile Detention, After 18 he would have been transferred to a regular jail. |
Introduction:
This is the story of an 11 year old who lived with his father. His only son and he had plans for him. Not to work the land but to graduate from college and be someone important his father said.
His father mr. brown wanted Jordan to go for a major he liked and after graduation to go for that field. What ever it was his father did not care as long as he finished college, liked the work and was willing to go into it.
The relationship between this two was very close and they did everything together from watching tv to go fishing. His dad work and when he came home time for his Jordan was very important.
Chris Brown met met 26 year old Debbie Houk. She was divorced with a daughter a couple of years younger than Jordan and another coming in out of of her 8 month pregnancy. They had moved together to a two story country house out in the woods. They would be all comfortable there for a room for each other and a room downstairs for the baby. But meanwhile Debbie was sleeping upstair and when the baby came should be moving to Jordans room downstair and he willl switch to go upstairs.
On this particular day Chris was running a little late for work, Jordan begged him to stay home but work was too important. Jordan went back to bed on the first floor south east bedroom.
The county tree cutters were outside with their truck and one of them saw the girl crying on the door to enter the living room. They came in and asked her, What’s wrong little girl, why the teat?” “My mom is dead” she said.
The workers called the police which arrived with the coroner which at the beginning thought it was a miscarriage until he turned her around and saw a bullet would on back of her head and yes she was dead.
You have here a real tragedy a young woman dead and her baby but there would be another tragedy which will wrapped the father and the son completely for 9 long years.
A couple of days latter Jordan hear a loud know on the door and he called his father It was the cop and they came for Jordan.
They never found a shot gun on him nor gun powder anywhere in his room or the house except the crime scene. They did find suspicious that Jordan never came out of his room when you had all the detectives going through every inch of the house. That does not sounds suspicious to me but you have a big case and you have people that usually don’t deal with this kind of stuff but have the pressure and responsibility to solve the crime, anyone could become a suspect. The case of Jon Renee comes to mind. Her parent and brothers were suspects until the day they found DNA that did not belong to any of them.
Jordan father had been working when she was killed and the examined him for gun powder and he had none. There was no gun and no evidence. All was circumstantial but that was enough to take this boy of 11 and send them to jail for the rest of his life.
The father never gave up. When went to seem a the Juvie everyday. They played games with he dictionary to have spelling under control. Jordan became more outgoing learning basketball and even to play guitar. This was a good smart kid that was taken from his father because there was nobody else to take.
This was a defective case from the beginning but when a jury finds you guilty, you see the end of your life in a case of murder. The appeals and appeals command went. It took them 9 long years to have the state Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to hear the case. They found him Not guilty right away because of lack of evidence which means the court can not bring the case back. He is free. Evidence is what can make a guilty one from not guilty and sometimes judges, cops and prosecutors forget that the constitution says we are innocent until proven guilty. No matter how we look, skin color, hair or no hair.
After that they left the county. Everybody knew Jordan as the 11 yrs monster murderer of the county.
I hate to tell you how many thousands of dollars it takes for appeals....The innocent project helped out
Story by Adam Gonzalez
Below are the different stories that came out after the ruling of the State’s Supreme Court:
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| Jordan Brown. ( Innocent Project) |
(_*_ ). ABC News
In a 5-0 ruling, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Jordan Brown, who was 11-years-old when he was arrested, booked into an adult jail and initially charged as an adult for the 2009 murder of his father’s pregnant fiancĂ©e. In 2012, Brown was adjudicated delinquent – meaning guilty in juvenile court – of first-degree murder and criminal homicide of an unborn child. Brown was released in 2016 after spending seven years in prison.Brown’s conviction was discharged based on the Supreme Court’s decision that there was insufficient evidence to convict Brown of the murder. No DNA or fingerprint evidence connected Brown to the crime. Further, there was no proof the shotgun found in the victim’s home was the murder weapon or that Brown pulled the trigger.
The court established that the forensic evidence and witness testimony were “consistent with two possibilities, first that a person or persons unknown entered the house in which the victim was sleeping and shot her to death after Brown and his sister had left for school…”“Second, the Commonwealth’s theory, that, after [Brown’s] father left for work, [Brown], in full view of [his stepsister], walked upstairs and retrieved a 20-gauge shotgun from his bedroom, walked back downstairs, retrieved a shotgun shell from a box of shells located in an armoire in the victim’s bedroom on which the television set she was watching was located, shot the victim in the back of the head as she lay on the bed facing that television, took the shotgun back upstairs and returned it to its former position — after wiping it clean of any physical evidence caused by the shooting — then caught the school bus with [his stepsister], and went to school as if it were any other normal morning.”
Because Brown’s conviction was reversed based on insufficient evidence, the case is over and there will not be a new trial. At 20-years-old, Brown is finally free.“You go from hours, to days, to weeks, to months and then years — and here we are nine years later,” Brown’s father, Christopher Brown, said during a press conference yesterday. “Half of his life he spent in this system to get to our final day today. To me that’s an issue. That’s an issue.”
“At the end of the day, if anything positive comes of this is maybe some of the higher-ups look at this juvenile system and how broken it is.”
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| Jordan now |
NEW CASTLE, PENNSYLVANIA: Jordan Brown was just 11-years-old when he was arrested and charged for the death of his father's heavily-pregnant fiancee. He went on to spend more than seven years in custody, repeatedly claiming his innocence, before he was cleared of the accusations. He is now suing the system for what his lawyers described as a "stolen childhood”. Kenzie Houk, 26, was shot in the back of the neck on February 20, 2009, as she slept in the family's farmhouse near New Castle that she shared with Brown, his father and her two young daughters. Eight-months-pregnant at the time, both she and her unborn son died as a result of the attack.
The next day, state police arrested Brown, who was a fifth-grader at the time. The state Attorney General said Houk had been killed by a youth-model Harrington & Richardson 20-gauge shotgun that Brown had received as a Christmas gift from his father, with Pennsylvania State Police reporting finding a spent shotgun shell near the path the 11-year-old walked to get to his school bus the morning of her murder. Investigators also cited evidence that included gunshot residue on his clothing and statements from Houk's seven-year-old daughter Jenessa, and announced Brown would be charged as an adult in the crime. If convicted, he faced life in prison without the possibility of parole. The move was a controversial one at the time, with Amnesty International opposing the effort to try him as an adult and arguing that the sentence he faced was a violation of international law. Brown spent the next three years in a juvenile detention facility in Erie while the Pennsylvania courts deliberated his status. On April 13, 2012, he was tried as a juvenile and convicted being delinquent, which is effectively a guilty verdict. It would be a conviction that would take more than six years to be overturned.
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| Jordan on the right was tried for double murder. Kenzie the victim knew Jordan all his life and he called her mom |
In 2018, the state's Supreme Court reversed the lower court's opinion in a 5-0 decision and determined that the evidence in the case pointing to Brown as the culprit could just as easily have been used to implicate another unknown assailant and was insufficient to find him culpable beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme Court pointed out that no DNA or fingerprint evidence was linking Brown to the killing, and that the evidence investigators did have did not prove the shotgun they seized from his home was the murder weapon.
In an interview with ABC's "20/20" after the Supreme Court's decision, Brown had shared that, when he was arrested, he did not even understand the crime of which he was being accused. "They put me in the back of the car and they took me to the police barracks. And I was in there. And then they took me straight to the county jail," he recalled of the day he was taken into custody. "I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t know where I was at, like, what was going on or anything.”
Now, he's seeking compensation for a childhood that he will never get back. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Brown, now 22, had filed a federal lawsuit against a former Pennsylvania State Police commissioner and four former troopers involved in his case. In the lawsuit, Brown claimed these law enforcement officials violated his constitutional rights, fabricated reports and manufactured evidence against him, which culminated in a "falsified criminal narrative that stole his entire childhood," violated internal protocols for interviewing child witnesses in order to guide and influence the victim's children into making incriminating statements about him and "bent other information to a nefarious purpose.”
Alec Wright, one of Brown’s lawyers, said the past decade represented his "stolen childhood" and that if he wins the case, a jury will be posed with a "million-dollar" question that they will have to answer: How much is a childhood really worth? "How do you put a value on, for most of us, the only opportunity we get to be truly free, to find ourselves, to not have the stressors of adulthood, the ability to play in the dirt and get muddy and get food on your clothes and nobody cares, to make mistakes?" he said. "How do you compensate the loss of that?” "This is Jordan’s only opportunity to be compensated for his being wrongfully convicted for the entirety of his childhood," he added.
Debbie Houk, the victim's mother, said she was infuriated when she learned about Brown's lawsuit and that she views it as nothing but a cash grab. "It’s just sickening to think that he should sue the police now," she said. "I think that’s awful; that makes me sick." She said she and her husband, Jack, were "200% sure" that it was Brown who killed their daughter. "They want to blame someone else," she claimed. "They’re just grabbing at straws."
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