WTF Fridays: James Jordan

Come with me down memory lane for a moment, folks, back about 18 years or so...

In 1993, a body was discovered bobbing about in a little creek in the town of Bennettsville, SC, a state where they have two mottos: "While I breathe, I hope" and "Gawdamn, Jethro, that's your sister!" As it was 100 degrees out and the body had been rapidly decomposing for some time, coroner Tom Brown opted to cremate it, because being Bennettsville man, he had no facilities for handling a corpse of this or any sort.

There was no ID on the body. The only thing they could tell was that it was a black man in his 50s who had appeared to have been shot in the chest at point-blank range (the bullet was lodged in the aorta).

By cremating the victim, the coroner had removed any chance of dental or finger print identification. Even though the victim's car was later found right over the border in North Carolina (where they are slightly ahead of the learning curve with regard to coroners), he was treated in South Carolina as a murder victim because by gum, that's where he was found.

Here's the kicker: in South Carolina, where a professed belief in evolution will result in you becoming the town pariah, the position of coroner is elected...which means that anyone can run. That's right, the metalhead fuckwit in your high school history class who used sneak smokes between classes and said crude things about your mother's sexual predilections could be granted a crucial role in any murder investigation. No medical degree, not even the knowledge of which organ does what or even the ability to identify if one's been removed required. In fact, the previous coroner in that part of South Carolina, who had served for about 40 years, was legally blind.

Since this murder occurred, however, South Carolina has decided to hop onto the crazy whirligig of enlightenment and instill more rigid standards in who came become coroner. They decided that the candidates MUST have a high school degree, by gosh, and they won't settle for anything less.

In the case of this body being pulled from the creek in South Carolina, the coroner's defense was, "No one had been reported missing in North or South Carolina."

Flawless logic there, Tom old boy. No one had been reported as missing that you knew of...so by that logic, the man you'd just pulled from the river was accounted for ("Oh, yeah...we know exactly where he is. He's not missing. He's floating in a swamp").

But wait, there's more.

When the body was identified, guess who it was?

James Jordon, Michael Jordon's father. Yep. Of Chicago Bulls fame.

Larry Demery and Daniel Green (or Lord D.A.A.S. U'Allah, as he's now known), convicted in the murder, are still in jail. In true "It wasn't me, it was HIM" fashion, they're still blaming each other, even though the original jury was shown a video of Green dancing, wearing the two NBA rings and a watch that belonged to James Jordon.

This little news tidbit slid under the radar because Jordon's family asked the media to treat the matter with respect and leave them to their grief...which they did. The only reason it popped up again in 2010 was because the state bureau of investigations found that "laboratory technicians mishandled or omitted evidence" in the Jordan case 13 years later.

Ya think? I'd call cremating the body of a dead man just because you don't have a big enough fridge more than just a snafu in paperwork.

After cooling their heels for 18 years in the pokey, these two murderers are up for parole in a few years and are professing they're changed men. According to their own testimony, they were on their way to a robbery when they saw James Jordan napping at a rest area in North Carolina in his $40,000 Lexus and thought it would be much easier just to rob and shoot the man than go through all the hassle and folderol of a robbery.

This one still has me scratching my head and wondering why the legal system is bending over backwards to a) defend these guilty men, and b) feed, clothe, and shelter them on taxpayer money so they can continue to build up fraudulent law suits, take college classes, and generally have a much better quality of life than they had before they were arrested, and c) not put them down like the rabid dogs they are so they can't harm anyone else or, worse, breed.

In fact, as he was found guilty and led away in shackles after the original trial, Green remarked to the court at large, "This is Robeson County. What do you expect in this county?"

God forbid we should put a guilty man or men in jail as punishment for their crimes. What dark pit yawns before us, if we adopt that sort of dangerous thinking?