A Kansas City man’s family is defending him against accusations by the family of a man found dead at his house after a Kansas City Chiefs game earlier this month.
Three men — David Harrington, Ricky Johnson, and Clayton McGeeney — were found dead in Jordan Willis’s backyard two days after the game, the Kansas City Star reported. Speculation has spread rampantly in the British and American tabloid press as Kansas City police say they are awaiting autopsy and toxicology reports that will indicate cause of death before deciding how to proceed.
So far, police say, they have seen no evidence of foul play.
The bodies were found after McGeeney’s fiancee went to Willis’s rental house and broke in when she couldn’t get anyone to respond.
Willis’s attorney, John Picerno, said that his client fell asleep — and was sleeping with a loud fan and noise-cancelling headphones — when the three friends left his home. Picerno said that Willis works from home and didn’t leave from January 7, the date of the football game, until January 9, when police arrived. In freezing, raining, and snowing weather, he had no reason to leave the house or go into the backyard and hadn’t noticed the friends’ vehicles still parked on the street, Picerno said.
Picerno later revealed that a fifth person was also at the house but left first.
As investigators remain tightlipped while they await the medical examiner’s reports, the dead men’s families — particularly Harrington’s — have openly spread their own theories about what happened.
Harrington’s father, Jon Harrington, told The New York Post that he is “not buying” Willis’s story.
“[Harrington’s mother] and I are both convinced that Jordan Willis played a part in this somehow,” Jon Harrington said Thursday.
He said that the three friends saw “something that they shouldn’t have seen,” prompting Willis to perhaps cause their deaths.
Rickie Johnson Sr., Ricky Johnson’s father, also sees something nefarious.
“My theory is they got poisoned,” he told Inside Edition. “And they were dragged out o the house and out in the backyard.”
Neither Harrington nor Johnson, however, have anything other than their own ideas to go on. And Picerno dismissed the speculation.
“[Willis] has nothing to hide. He went to the police station and spoke with officers without a lawyer present, he allowed them to search his home … these were his friends … he didn’t want any harm to come to any of them,” he told British tabloid The Daily Mail.
And Willis’s father jumped in Thursday, telling the Post after it published Harrington’s theories that his son “didn’t do anything wrong.”
“He would never in a million years do anything,” Rodney Willis said, pointing out that the four men were friends and that his son, who has moved out of the rental house where the men died, is also grieving.
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[Featured image: David Harrington, Clayton McGeeney, and Ricky Johnson/Facebook]
