Kansas City Chiefs fan found dead in lawn chair on back porch, 'paints a picture we didn't have': family
The brother of one of the Kansas City Chiefs fans found dead in a friend's backyard says that one of the men's frozen bodies was found sitting in a lawn chair, which he says "paints a picture we didn't have from the beginning."
Ricky Johnson, 38; Clayton McGeeney, 36; and David Harrington, 37, were all found dead outside their friend Jordan Willis' rental home on Jan. 9 after attending an NFL watch party there two days earlier. A fifth man at the party said he left the house around midnight, according to his attorney, while Willis' lawyer has said he has no knowledge of what happened.
The Kansas City Police Department has insisted in interviews with Fox News Digital that their deaths are "100% not being investigated as a homicide," that Willis is not considered a suspect and that he has cooperated fully with investigators.
On Monday, Ricky Johnson's brother Jonathan Price offered more insight into their confounding deaths in an interview with NewsNation.
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"David [Harrington] was found in a lawn chair on the back porch rather than all three laying flat," Price said. "As a brother I'm looking at everything."
Medical examiners have yet to reveal the men's causes of death, with a spokesperson at Frontier Forensics Midwest telling Fox News Digital that the results of the men's toxicology reports will take six to eight weeks to process, while their full autopsy reports won't be released for another 10 to 12 weeks.
"It's the same every day with the lack of answers and the inability to truly mourn without any cause," Price said on Monday. "I want to be involved more. My mother and Ricky's father want to be involved more and we're not just getting answers from the investigation.
"I'm not saying there was or was not a crime, but if you immediately suspect no foul play, then you should have a story, you should have something to tell the families and for no one to hear anything, that doesn't make any sense."
Willis, a Virginia native, graduated with a Ph.D. in chemical and physical biology from Vanderbilt University in 2014. He previously studied chemistry and molecular biology at Northwest Missouri State University.
According to an interview that Willis gave to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative's website in 2022, he is the senior principal scientist at the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center in Kansas City.
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The three men were found in Willis' backyard two days after watching the Chiefs play the Los Angeles Chargers there. After days of being unable to reach her fiance or Willis, one of the men's partners broke into Willis' property and called police after finding one of the men dead.
Willis' attorney, John Picerno, has told Fox News Digital and other news outlets that his client worked from home, was sleeping for much of the time between escorting the men out of his house and the discovery of their bodies, and had no idea that their bodies were on his property until police came to his home around 9 p.m. on Jan. 9.
"I don't care who you are or where you live – if it's snowing outside you're looking outside to see how bad it's getting," Price said of these claims. "It doesn't matter if you work from home, you've got to leave sometime, and from his lawyer we don't know if he left or not because he started out saying he left the home sporadically throughout the day and then another one where he was home for 50 hours."
Experts have spoken with Fox News Digital about the possibility that drugs – like fentanyl analogs or a synthetic like K2 – played a role in the men's deaths.
"I do not speculate on what my brother has done in the past, I just know he was a good man," Price said. "He loved his daughters to death. He absolutely had future plans to be a father to them for the rest of their lives and he absolutely wouldn't jeopardize that."
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In an interview with NewsNation last week, Harrington's mother Jennifer Marquez pleaded for Willis to come forward with more information.
"I want Jordan to come forward and say you know this wasn't meant to happen, but this is what happened. I did this, or I saw this, you know, just tell us," she said.
Friends and family of the three men allege that they sent numerous calls and messages to Willis in the time period before the bodies were found, even knocking at his front door and calling out for him outside.
Picerno has denied these allegations, first telling Fox News Digital that he only received one message on Facebook Messenger, then telling NewsNation that Willis had only incoming messages – not outgoing messages that would indicate he had seen them before police arrived.
"I think that's why he didn't answer the text messages that people sent him and I think that's why he waited too long to let anybody know what happened with the men," Marquez said. "I heard from several people that said they kept texting him, you know they went and knocked on the door, they banged on the door... how could you keep missing texts and people knocking on your door and not notice texts or any of that?"
Previously, Johnson and Harrington's parents told Fox News Digital they believe Willis played an active role in their sons' deaths by "drugging" them or "concocting something."
Meanwhile, a source close to Willis' family told Fox News Digital that "the mad scientist agenda is absolutely ridiculous," and that Willis is "devastated" over the deaths of his friends.
"Not only is the whole country accusing him of murdering his friends without factual details, evidence or any charges at this time, but he also lost three close friends," the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Fox Nation in an exclusive interview Saturday.
"He didn’t get to say goodbye or go to their funerals due to the circumstances of these wild speculations and accusations."