A video showing a detained, handcuffed Jordan Willis was captured by a neighbor on the night police discovered the bodies of his friends Clayton McGeeney, Ricky Johnson and David Harrington in his Kansas City backyard.
Although the video is only seconds long, neighbor Ashton Brady, 25, told Fox News Digital that there was a heavy police presence at the house across his street on Jan. 9 for at least an hour and a half before he went to bed.
First, Brady said, he saw a distressed-looking woman hurrying from the house and making a phone call – according to the Kansas City Police department, McGeeney’s fiancée dialed 911 for a welfare check to the Northwest 83rd Terrace home around 8:51 p.m. that night.
Family members told Fox News Digital that she discovered the first body after she frantically broke onto Willis’ property, unable to reach him or her partner. She allegedly knocked at the door and even shouted Willis’ name from inside the house before making the discovery.
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“I just thought when I saw her, I thought it was weird watching her walk from the side of the house – she came out through the back,” Brady recalled in a Wednesday interview. “It was weird, the pace she was walking and talking on the phone. She looked back over her shoulder every so often at the house.”
“She looked upset for sure, like she didn’t know what was going on or anything,” he said.
Brady went back into his house, but returned to watch the scene across the street after seeing the lights of an ambulance through his bedroom window.
By the time he got back outside, he said, about four police cars had amassed across the street and police officers surrounded a handcuffed man wearing just boxers or sleep shorts.
“He was detained for probably, like, 30 to 45 minutes. He was shirtless for 10 or 15 minutes and then a police officer grabbed a jacket out of the house,” Brady said.
Lights inside the house remained off, but Brady said he could see officers’ flashlights through its windows as police conducted their search. At some point, he said, he could see lights coming from the backyard.
As time passed, the police presence grew – what was initially just four cars became eight or 10 on the small street, he said.
“He was handcuffed and the woman was with the other police talking, so I figured a dispute broke out, and they were getting both sides of a story,” Brady said. “I thought ‘maybe they just got into an argument’ – at the time I didn’t know they found bodies… I thought it was strange that I saw the police go through the house.”
“People asked if I saw any bodies come out, I never did,” he said.
After about an hour and a half, Brady said, the woman and the man he now knows to be Willis were taken away in police cars. At some point Willis was uncuffed, because Brady could “see his arms moving.”
Another neighbor, Maya Dukes, told Fox News Digital that there was still a police presence at Willis’ home around 4 a.m. the next day.
“We woke up and there were cops up and down the street and caution tape – you couldn’t go anywhere,” she recalled. “They didn’t have their lights on or anything, they were just out on the street and at that house.”
Brady would only learn the extent of the tragedy that took place across the street the next day:
“My roommate texted me at work – I was like ‘holy s—, I didn’t know that.”
Brady said that he and his roommate had just moved from elsewhere in Kansas City to the house across the street from Willis, and had spent the previous week settling in. He was away on a hunting trip with friends on the weekend of the Kansas City Chiefs game against the Los Angeles Chargers, when the men were last seen alive at Willis’ home on Jan. 7.
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Dukes said she noticed trucks parked outside the house because they were parked in “a weird spot where people don’t normally leave their cars.”
The two trucks are visible in Brady’s video. Family members of the deceased men have criticized Willis for not noticing that his friend’s vehicles were still on his street and thinking something was amiss.
In the days following Willis’ arrest, Johnson’s family told Fox News Digital they retrieved their son’s vehicle. Brady said the other car left the street, as well, but was unsure whether it was driven or towed away. It is unclear when the three men arrived at Willis’ home.
“If they were there Friday and didn’t get found until Tuesday, I don’t know how long they could’ve been dead,” Brady said.
“It’s kind of weird,” Brady said of moving into his new home as the tragedy was unfolding. “It’s been… I don’t know, it’s been interesting for me. At first, I didn’t know if I should say anything [about the video], I didn’t know how big of a deal it was. I kind of wish I didn’t say anything because now my phone’s blowing up and people are hitting me up. [But] I just feel for the families… hopefully it helps a little bit.”
He said he had never seen Willis before that night.
“I have theories on it,” Brady said when asked what he thought of the mysterious deaths across the street. “I personally, I don’t know. It’s weird to me. The weirdest thing to me is if it was an overdose, no one called or anything like that – I went to school and partied – usually when something like that happens, when you call the police or the ambulance, no one usually gets in trouble.”
The Kansas City Police Department has told Fox News Digital that the deaths of the three men are “100 percent not being investigated as a homicide,” and that Willis is not considered a suspect. Toxicology reports will take six to eight weeks to process, according to the private company contracted by Platte County to carry out autopsies, while their full autopsy reports will not be released for another 10 to 12 weeks.
Willis’ attorney, John Picerno, said that his client works from home, slept for “a lot” of the time between allegedly seeing the three men out of his house after the Chiefs game. Therefore, Picerno said, he did not see messages or phone calls, and did not hear concerned loved ones knocking at his door.
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Two men were seen loading Willis’ belongings into a U-Haul truck in the days following Jan. 9, neighbors said – the source said that it has since been moved into storage, and that he is “still cooperating with the police department in their investigation.”
