Defense Says Detective’s Methods ‘Very Quick, Very Slick, and Very Nefarious’

By Laura Berol , Joseph Wolf - September 11, 2024
Court | Daily Stories | Homicides | Shooting | Suspects | Victims |

Three closing arguments in a homicide case, presented by the prosecution and attorneys for two co-defendants, offered the jury conflicting interpretations of the facts in a trial before DC Superior Court Judge Rainey Brandt on Sept. 9.

Ky’lee Palmer, 25, and Aaron Adgerson, 21, are charged with first-degree murder, assault with intent to kill while armed, and two counts of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence. In addition, Palmer is charged with destruction of property worth $1,000 or more and tampering with physical evidence. The charges stem from the shooting death of 60-year-old Barron Goodwin on Feb. 12, 2020, on the 800 block of 51st Street, SE. 

“While he was nodding off, his life was taken, his life was stolen, his life was ended in a barrage of gunfire from the defendants, Mr. Palmer and Mr. Adgerson,” a prosecutor said during the prosecution’s closing statement. 

The prosecutor knocked on the jury box six times to mirror the number of times the gun was fired at the house where Goodwin was asleep on the couch. He played footage from a body-worn camera that depicted Goodwin lying in a pool of blood, with more blood spewing from his head. 

The prosecution argued Palmer displayed a history of escalating domestic violence against his girlfriend, who testified she had an on-again-off-again relationship with Palmer at the time of the murder. They said Palmer organized a shooting at the house where his girlfriend and her brother lived in retaliation for their attempts to retrieve the phone Palmer had allegedly stolen from her the day before the murder. 

According to the doctrine of transferred intent, Goodwin’s accidental killing constituted first-degree murder if the shooter or the vehicle’s driver intended to kill someone else in the house.

The prosecution displayed Instagram text messages from Palmer to Adgerson half an hour before the shooting, in which Palmer arranged to pick up Adgerson with the stated purpose of going to get something to eat. 

Instead of getting food, the prosecutor argued, Palmer drove Adgerson to Palmer’s girlfriend’s home, where Adgerson fired at the house from the car window.

The prosecution noted Adgerson allegedly deleted all the Instagram messages between Palmer and him from his phone after Goodwin died.

“Why would you do that?” a prosecutor asked the jury. “You do that because you shot up a house and killed someone, and you want to cover your tracks.”

The prosecution said, after driving Adgerson home, Palmer lit a fire inside the car used for the shooting, to destroy evidence.

Palmer confessed the shooting and the burning of the car to the mother of his child three months after the incident, she told Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detectives in 2022.

“He was crying because I was telling him that I was going to leave him if he didn’t tell me the truth,” the mother of Palmer’s son told detectives, according to the prosecution. At the time of Palmer’s alleged confession, she was seven months pregnant with their child.

A prosecutor explained to the jury that both Palmer and Adgerson are guilty of Goodwin’s death if they carried out the shooting together, even if only one of them fired the gun. 

If the jury believes they did the shooting but doesn’t believe they intended to kill anyone, they can be found guilty of second-degree murder instead of first-degree.

Michael Madden, one of Adgerson’s defense attorneys, insisted his client is not guilty because he wasn’t there.

“By not guilty, I mean he wasn’t in the car. He wasn’t driving around with Ky’lee Palmer, and he wasn’t shooting up a house,” said Madden.

“There’s one trial for Mr. Adgerson, and there’s another going on in the same room with the same characters for Mr. Palmer. They are, however, completely different trials,” Madden told the jury. “A guilty verdict against one defendant does not mean a guilty verdict against the other.”

Madden argued that the only witness who claimed to have seen Adgerson in the car with Palmer was unreliable because he gave testimony while facing prosecution for an unrelated offense and while serving time for that offense.

“Most of the time, when the homicide branch gets help, the person who provided the help gets help, too,” said the lead detective in the case in a videotaped interview with the witness from 2020 that Madden played for the jury.

According to Madden, the witness claimed to have heard the gunshots while getting a haircut at a barbershop during that interview, which occurred moments after his arrest in an unrelated shooting. Madden argued the witness didn’t claim to have seen Palmer and Adgerson driving to the shooting until he was interviewed by the same detective again in 2022.

Madden argued that, if the witness actually saw Palmer with someone on the way to the shooting, it might not have been Adgerson. He pointed out that the mother of Palmer’s child testified that Palmer told her he was with a different friend, not Adgerson, during the shooting.

“Mr. Adgerson had absolutely no motive to kill anyone in the house,” Madden said. “They didn’t even know him.”

According to Madden, the cell site data the prosecution used to argue Palmer and Adgerson drove to Palmer’s house was consistent with their driving to other places, including Palmer’s residence at the time.

“That’s the [prosecution] cherry-picking, cherry-picking various plot points from their evidence, and telling you it’s proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which it’s not,” Madden said.

David Akulian, a defense attorney for Palmer, questioned the reliability of witnesses’ testimony during his closing argument.

“We’re going to go to all the places where [the lead detective] suggests evidence to the witnesses. It’s very quick, very slick, and very nefarious,” Akulian said.

Akulian noted that the lead detective interviewed the mother of Palmer’s child in 2020, but it wasn’t until 2022, when Palmer was charged with assaulting her and she left him, that she reported his alleged confession of Goodwin’s shooting to the police. 

Akulian argued that the questions the lead detective asked her in 2020 gave her the information she needed to invent a false confession from Palmer in 2022 that matched the facts of the case. 

He said she repeatedly claimed not to remember information during her testimony in the trial. According to Akulian, she was trying to take back her 2022 testimony.

Akulian showed footage of the lead detective interviewing the witness who claimed to have seen Palmer and Adgerson in the car on the way to the shooting. While asking the witness if he knew what the shooting was about, the lead detective suggested it might be related to Palmer’s girlfriend – Goodwin’s niece – and “someone she had to deal with.”

“You just saw what [the lead detective] did in a recorded video. What do you think he did unrecorded, when nobody’s watching?” Akulian asked the jury.

“[The lead detective] had numerous unrecorded interviews,” Akulian said. “[He] began feeding [the witness] information less than a month after the shooting.”

“He [the incarcerated witness] even said that on cross examination,” Akulian added, “agreeing that [the lead detective] was giving him information that he didn’t used to have.”

“The [prosecution] bought his testimony. They gave him five years for 13 pulls of a trigger,” Akulian said, referring to the unrelated offense for which the witness was sentenced between his police interviews in 2020 and 2022. “Only five years. I wonder why that is?”

Akulian showed footage of the witness telling the lead detective he had symptoms of mental illness.

“Ninety seconds of telling the police, ‘I hear voices all the time’–not true,” said Akulian. “[The witness] is willing to say things that aren’t true to get what’s in it for him.”

Akulian noted a gun matching the shell casings found at the scene of the shooting and in the burned car was discovered when police stopped three men for driving with an open container of alcohol later in 2020. He argued the lead detective ignored those men’s possible connections to Goodwin’s death.

“You didn’t hear from [the lead detective],” Akulian pointed out to the jury. “Out on medical leave–sure. But the fact remains, you didn’t hear from him.”

“We know that she did not seem particularly happy to be here,” a prosecutor said about the mother of Palmer’s child during the prosecution’s rebuttal. 

He attributed her unhappiness to testifying against Palmer in his presence, saying, “This is the father” of her child.

“She did not say to you, ‘That didn’t happen.’ She didn’t say, ‘I lied before.’ She didn’t say, ‘I made it up,'” the prosecutor pointed out.

The prosecutor advised the jury to watch the entire video of the lead detective’s 2020 interview with the witness who later claimed he saw Palmer and Adgerson driving to the shooting. According to the prosecutor, that was the lead detective’s only contact with the witness before his sentencing, and the witness didn’t give the lead detective any useful testimony then.

“There’s absolutely no evidence that [the witness] was a cooperator,” the prosecutor said.

Judge Brandt instructed the jury and ordered them to report on Sept. 10 to begin deliberations.

Parties are set to reconvene when a verdict is returned.