Five days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court exonerated Jordan Brown of committing double homicide as an 11-year-old, his father sat in front of a line of TV news cameras in Beaver County and remembered that first day, nine years ago.
On the first day, Feb. 20, 2009, Christopher Brown’s fiancee, Kenzie Marie Houk, 26, and her unborn child were shot to death at the family’s home in Lawrence County. At 3:30 a.m. the next day, police arrested 11-year-old Jordan and booked him as an adult into the Lawrence County Jail.
“I remember [attorney] Dennis [Elisco] and I would go over and try to keep him in positive spirits, saying, ‘We’re working on getting you out of here; we’re working on getting you home,’” Mr. Brown said Monday, seated next to his now 20-year-old son in their attorney’s office. Jordan did not address the media.
“You go from hours, to days, to weeks, to months and then years — and here we are nine years later,” Mr. Brown said. “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.”
Here is the state Supreme Court’s ruling:
Jordan Brown, now a rising sophomore in college studying computer science, was found responsible for killing Ms. Houk and her unborn baby in 2012, when he was 14 years old. But on Wednesday, the state Supreme Court vacated that decision and ruled there was not enough evidence to convict him. He cannot be retried, his attorneys said.
“The exoneration is largely unprecedented, but it speaks volumes as to the insufficiency of the case,” Mr. Elisco said Monday. He and attorney Stephen Colafella advised Jordan Brown not to speak during the press conference, and he sat quietly in a gray suit, at times exchanging words or smiles with his legal team.
“He’s grown into a young man and we can all vouch for his intelligence and responsibility,” Mr. Elisco said. “How he does it, I don’t know. But he harbors no ill feelings or malice. Jordan and his father were also victims of this horrific, horrific, heinous crime.”
Although Jordan did not speak with reporters, Mr. Colafella said they wanted him to appear on camera to show the world that he was no longer the hard-eyed boy in the mugshot that spread across the world after his arrest.
“Frankly, given what he has been forced to endure, we thought he at least deserved the attention of people seeing the young man he’s become, rather than those images of that 11-year-old boy who looked shocked and unaware of what was really going on at the time of his arrest,” Mr. Colafella said.
Mr. Brown said his son graduated high school with a 3.9 GPA and is excelling in college.
“At no point in time over the last nine years has there ever been a report filed in his case to suggest any type of issue whatsoever, psychologically, behaviorally,” Mr. Brown said. “Every report has said he has been where he needs to be in terms of his mental capacity, [with] no behavioral issues.”
Both Mr. Brown and the attorneys declined to discuss whether they plan to sue and called on authorities to reopen the investigation into Ms. Houk’s killing.
“There are people who are sworn to investigate, and I’d hope they do that,” Mr. Brown said. “And find the real murderer, who by the way, has been walking the streets for nine years.”
Mr. Brown recalled driving 200 miles round trip to Erie every day for three years to visit Jordan, and said watching the boy grow up in the juvenile system is something he wouldn’t “wish on any parent.”
There is no way for his son to reclaim those childhood years, Mr. Brown said.
“ ‘Can you get that back?’ ” Mr. Brown said, echoing a reporter’s question. “That’s the question. And I think the answer in short is no. But what matters most is moving on.”
He wasn’t surprised by the court’s decision last week, Mr. Brown said, just “disappointed it had taken this long.”
And he hopes his son’s exoneration prompts changes within the juvenile justice system.
“At the 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,” Mr. Brown said. “It was like a nightmare that my kid was involved in this system.”
Shelly Bradbury: 412-263-1999, sbradbury@post-gazette.com or follow @ShellyBradbury on Twitter.
First Published: July 23, 2018, 4:54 p.m.
