Midwest
Video shows Kansas City Chiefs watch party host handcuffed after friends’ bodies found
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.
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS FANS DEATHS: JORDAN WILLIS CHECKS INTO REHAB AS FAMILIES AWAIT TOXICOLOGY RESULTS
In a still taken by neighbor Ashton Brady, Jordan Willis can be seen in handcuffs and boxer shorts, surrounded by police on the evening of Jan. 9. His friends Ricky Johnson, David Harrington and Clayton McGeeney were found dead on his property that evening – Kansas City Police have told Fox News Digital that they do not suspect foul play in their deaths. (Fox News Digital)
“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.
“We woke up and there were cops up and down the street and caution tape – you couldn’t go anywhere.”
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.
Attorney and retired NYPD inspector Paul Mauro told Fox News Digital that no meaningful insights about the case can be inferred from the manner in which Willis was detained:
“You can cuff for your own safety, and they did have three [dead on arrivals], so they didn’t know what they were into here,” Mauro said of police at the scene.
HIV scientist Jordan Willis, 38, checked himself into a rehab facility after his three friends were found dead in his backyard on Jan. 9. It is unclear whether drugs played a role in their death, as their toxicology results are still pending. (GitHub)
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.”
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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.
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS FANS FOUND DEAD IN FRIEND’S BACKYARD: WHAT TO KNOW
David Harrington, Clayton McGeeney and Ricky Johnson were found dead outside their friend’s Kansas City home on Jan. 9, 2024. (Ricky Johnson/Facebook)
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.
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS FAN DEATHS: JORDAN WILLIS ‘DEPRESSED’ OVER ‘WILD SPECULATIONS’ ABOUT PALS, SOURCE SAYS
An exterior view of the backyard and porch of Jordan Willis’s home in Kansas City, Missouri on Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. The bodies of Willis’ three friends – Ricky Johnson, Clayton McGeeney, and David Harrington – were found in Willis’ backyard, with one body found on the porch, on Jan. 9, 2024, two days after attending a Kansas City Chiefs watch party at the home. (DWS for Fox News Digital)
“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.”
Ashton Brady poses for a photo on his front porch in Kansas City, Missouri on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024. Brady’s neighbor, Jordan Willis, was briefly detained while police searched his home after three of his friends were found dead in his backyard after a football watch party earlier in January. (DWS for Fox News Digital)
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.
PARENTS OF KANSAS CITY CHIEFS FANS FOUND DEAD THINK VICTIMS ‘SAW SOMETHING THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE SEEN’
Family and friends of Clayton McGeeney, left, David Harrington, center, and Ricky Johnson, right, are clamoring for answers after the three men inexplicably died in freezing temperatures outside their friend’s Kansas City home. (Facebook)
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Willis checked himself into an inpatient rehab facility shortly after moving out of his house and is “facing his addiction head-on” after the “enormous, heartbreaking wake-up call” of “los[ing] three of his close friends under extremely tragic circumstances,” a source close to the family told Fox News Digital.
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.”
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BISMARCK, N.D. (North Dakota Monitor) — North Dakota oil shipped on the Dakota Access Pipeline is fetching nearly $7 more per barrel than a U.S. benchmark price amid volatility caused by the Iran war.
State regulators aren’t sure why prices for North Dakota oil at its destination in Illinois are higher than traditional benchmark prices. One possibility is the light, sweet crude can be more easily refined into products like jet fuel and diesel that are experiencing demand surges in Europe and elsewhere.
How much of that higher price benefits North Dakota will be more clear in the coming months, said Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority.
“Royalty owners, the producers, the state, all share that uplift,” Kringstad said.
North Dakota crude oil typically is discounted compared to benchmark pricing to account for the cost of transportation. Kringstad and Nathan Anderson, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, expect to have more information next month about why the prices have been higher in recent weeks and how much of that value is filtering back to North Dakota.
“I would suspect that some portion of it, probably not all of it for sure, does make its way back,” Anderson said.
The new dynamic is a small part of a global oil market that has been thrown into chaos by the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime bottleneck for a fifth of the world’s oil production.
“Boy, this is largely dominated by the word volatility. That’s the way I would describe pricing over the last 50 days,” Anderson said. “But over the last seven days, I think we’ve had almost a $20 swing in price, depending upon what talks are occurring between the United States and Iran.”
That chaotic market dynamic and the uncertainty of how long the conflict, and subsequently high oil prices, will endure is a big reason why publicly-traded oil companies have not invested in new drilling, Anderson said.
But the number of maintenance rigs has risen from 110 to 125 since last month, suggesting that oil companies are trying to optimize production from existing wells while oil prices remain high, the director said.
There are 26 active drilling rigs in North Dakota, and companies have indicated plans to add one or two more, Anderson said.
Beyond that, Anderson does not expect publicly-traded companies to increase drilling activity until 2027 because their budgets for this year are already set. Privately-owned oil companies have more flexibility and could potentially invest in more drilling than they budgeted for this year if prices remain high enough to warrant it.
There is little data available on what impact the Iran war has had on North Dakota oil production so far because data is not available in real time. February figures, prior to the beginning of the war, were released Tuesday and showed the state produced an average of nearly 1.13 million barrels of oil per day. North Dakota also produced more than 3.32 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.
The daily oil production is 1.76% below the revenue forecast used to guide North Dakota’s budget-making process. But Anderson expects those numbers to increase when March production is announced next month.
“One of the things that occurred when the Iran conflict happened was that those operators that had curtailed or shut in production during the low price environment started to bring that production online,” Anderson said.
North Dakota Monitor reporter Jacob Orledge can be reached at jorledge@northdakotamonitor.com.
The NWSL is once again expanding, this time the league is heading to Ohio where Columbus NWSL 2028 will take the field. Of course, Columbus NWSL 2028 is a placeholder for now and the the new team will unveil its name, crest, and uniform to build an identity around as it approaches its first season.
News of the club was announced yesterday, though this has been in the works for some time, in a press conference. Team owners, the Haslam Sports Group (HSG), Nationwide and Drs. Christine and Pete Edwards, spoke about what they hope the club will bring to Columbus and women’s soccer more broadly.
“Our family is thrilled to help bring an NWSL team to Columbus and further invest in Ohio, with the honor of bringing the 18th team into the league,” said Haslam Sports Group Managing Partner Whitney Haslam Johnson. “We believe in the power of women’s sports and are humbled to be part of the number one women’s soccer league in the world.”
Nationwide insurance has been a corporate partner in both NWSL and MLS for years and now joins an ownership group deepening those ties. “Today’s announcement is about inspiring young athletes across Central Ohio, elevating women’s professional sports and reminding the world that Columbus is a first-class sports city,” said Kirt Walker, Nationwide Chief Executive Officer. “As Nationwide marks 100 years, this is a powerful way to celebrate our milestone with the community that has been our home from the very beginning.”
The Edwards family has deep roots in the Columbus soccer scene with Dr. Pete Edwards serving as team doctor for the Crew in 1996 and the family joining the team’s ownership in 2019 during the Save The Crew effort. “Columbus is very important to our family. For over 30 years, we’ve supported the Columbus Crew and MLS. We’ve seen how a men’s professional soccer team has brought people together and created a positive impact in our community. It’s truly special to now welcome an NWSL club and the incredible women athletes who will also uplift our city on and off the pitch,” said Dr. Christine Edwards. “We’re very excited to partner with Haslam Sports Group and Nationwide for NWSL Columbus 2028, and we can’t wait to share even more memorable moments with fans, especially during the Club’s first game at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field.”
The NWSL has continued its expansion with the announcement and the team will join Atlanta in its inaugural season in two years.
The University of South Dakota announced on Wednesday, April 22, that Athletic Director Jon Schemmel has received a five-year contract extension running through the 2030-31 academic year.
Schemmel has been in his position since January 2024 and was South Dakota’s senior associate athletic director for development from 2012-2017.
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“The University of South Dakota and Vermillion community is where our family wants to be,” Schemmel said in a press release. “I am humbled and grateful for the continued trust from President (Sheila) Gestring and the South Dakota Board of Regents to continue leading this athletics program. Coyote Nation has the best fans and donors, and we have a group of coaches, staff and student-athletes who are committed to competing for championships and continuing their excellence in the classroom and community.”
The athletics department has raised $49 million since Schemmel took over as AD, including $35 million in the 2025-26 academic year.
The Coyotes have won a Missouri Valley Football Conference championship and Summit League volleyball and men’s indoor track and field titles with Schemmel at the helm.
“USD’s athletic programs continue to thrive under Jon’s leadership,” Gestring said. “His knowledge of Division I athletics, forward-thinking vision for our teams and strength in fundraising have all been assets to our university. Our program is in great hands, and I am looking forward to seeing what Jon, his staff and our student-athletes achieve in the next five years.”
This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: South Dakota extends AD Jon Schemmel through 2030-31 academic year
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