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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.
Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. Before we get started, we wanted to share that you have helped us reach a major milestone, 100 million downloads of AOM.
We posted a thank you on social media, but for those of you that don't follow us, well, one, you should, I hope, to keep up with all things AOM and the latest that Scott and I are up to. But more importantly, we mention it here because we wanted to make sure that we gave each of you our sincerest thank you for so much support during these first two and a half years.
We will continue to tell these important stories, continue to honor the victims of these tragic cases while bringing you our insider's perspective. It is you, our AOM community, that has made this milestone possible, and we are both so incredibly thankful. Now, on to today's episode.
It hit social media before even the traditional media put it out there. What initially hit the community was, oh my God, this is a horrible crime that's almost instantaneously out there on video and you can watch it. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. Today we're talking about a couple that had a journey in life with ups and downs just like all of us have. But the end of their journey is so incredibly tragic that when I heard it, I was actually speechless.
- The first half of this couple is 41-year-old Timothy Heyman Jr., who worked in the line as a sous chef at the Darling Oyster Bar, a trendy restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina.
The city of Charleston has this really thriving food scene. We consider ourselves a really great town to come and eat in, rivaling even, you know, the bigger spots like, you know, New York and L.A. and things like that. And Tim was one of many employees in the food and beverage industry, of which I am a former member as well. This is Chad Simpson, a major case prosecutor for the Ninth Circuit Solicitor's Office in Charleston, South Carolina.
And even though he prosecutes homicide, he knows firsthand the demands of being a sous chef.
I mean, I worked very closely with many sous chefs. It's crazy intense. You know, it's probably one of the few jobs sort of similar to being a lawyer in criminal law where, you know, the stress levels are really high. I attribute sort of my time in the food and beverage industry is really forming me as a person and making me such a better lawyer today.
Tim's friends described him as extremely outgoing and personable and always seemed to be very protective. Someone you could always depend on. Tim Heyman was a very working class guy, a popular guy, you know, around town, you know, like a lot of chefs. I think he was kind of out there, you know, an outgoing personality, extrovert.
You know, Scott, there is this Instagram post that Sumit, our executive producer, gave to us that when you look at it, it just seems that Sous Chef was more than just a career because that is the photograph of him in his work apron and his cap. And it just seems like that's part of who Tim was. Looking through the photos, Anasiga, you could tell he really enjoyed being part of a crowd and also being the focus of some probably great stories standing or sitting at the bar.
Tim's other half was Christina Colon. And while Tim was cooking, Christina was working on the other side of the kitchen as a waitress. They fell in love in Denver, Colorado, where they also raised a daughter together. They seemed to be the perfect match. She was very, very passionate, a very big personality, fearless, not afraid to speak her mind, just a person with a lot of energy and life.
Now, this couple did have a rather hot and cold relationship, which led them to split up at different times. And they split up, at least they thought, for good when their daughter was four. But despite that breakup, it wasn't the end of their story. Christine moved back to Charleston and Tim eventually followed.
They hadn't necessarily reconciled and gotten back together romantically, but they had been getting along well enough that they decided that the best thing to do in the interest of their five-year-old child was to move in together and co-parent at the same location they're
When it came to raising their four-year-old daughter, they always put her first. For them, it was the right move. But it changed on August 8th, 2019. That was the big day where Tim and Christina used a rental truck to move their belongings under one roof. Tim was helping Christina move her things and some of the child's things.
The area that they were moving into in Charleston, I think about it like areas in most big cities today. I can even think about it in the Brooklyn neighborhoods that have changed so much that I know over the years. You know, the economy can take a toll on various neighborhoods over the years, but they can be rediscovered and people can see the beautiful bones of the architecture of the homes. And that's really what was happening here.
This is a pretty busy area of town, sort of a higher crime rate as compared to other areas of Peninsular Charleston, but always has a lot of people out, a lot of people riding around on bikes. You know, one house would be sort of a rundown old house, and then the house next door would be a completely renovated, beautiful Charleston-style house.
The Knight's Grocery, which is the location that would play an important part in this case, is only about two and a half blocks north of this location. It's residential, but it gets a lot of foot traffic and it's known to have a lot of people sort of hanging out outside. Moving in together was an important step in a home in every sense of the word for their daughter. But this was also going to be the last step.
Because at 7.45 p.m., everything in their life changed for the worst. The first responders heard the gunshots. They were just maybe six blocks away. And so the police responded very quickly to the scene. This was about 7.45, but in the summer. So it's broad daylight. So I received a call that night, maybe around 8 p.m. This is Sergeant Elizabeth Wolfson, the lead investigator for the case.
Actually, we had some officers that were just down the street in a park doing an event as well. So they actually heard gunshots and kind of responded, started trying to figure out what was going on. So they were there like within seconds. When the first officers arrived on scene, they found Tim Heyman lying on the back of the stairs of a home next door. Neighbors had already begun to attempt to revive Tim, who had been shot multiple times.
And his girlfriend, Christina Colon, who was understandably in a very hysterical state, and she was mainly concerned with the safety of their shared daughter, who was about five years old at the time, and was present in the house when the shooting occurred.
You know, as much as hearing about the homicide was hard, hearing that their daughter was inside, that is the thing that just moved me in a completely different way. Like, here's this little girl, like, it's her, her mom, and her dad under one roof. And yet that very same day, that dream was shattered. But this was just the beginning of unfortunate events for Christina and her daughter. But before we get into that, investigators now have a homicide to solve.
Now, remember how this area is described. These homes are really tight. They're basically one on top of the other, right next to each other. And with that comes people. And based on how close the homes were, plus the time of day, there's going to have been witnesses. Tim's girlfriend, Christina, was just a few feet away from Tim and the shooter when the gunfire rang out. She would be the best source of information at that very moment.
Christina was in quite a state of hysteria. It's totally understandable under the circumstances. Yeah, she was just distraught. It was almost like she was sort of a shell of a person. Like, she could tell me what happened, and she was angry about it. But more so than that, I think it was just like she didn't understand. There was also someone else, a witness, a neighbor who lived right upstairs and saw what occurred.
So what was told to police is that Tim was out there helping to move furniture from the U-Haul into the residence when an individual on a bicycle passes the U-Haul and sees Tim. He's got headphones in, like rapping along with music or something. He sort of gestures towards Tim.
And he's using a lot of obscenities and profanities. And so he just kind of appears to verbally accost Tim. And Tim sort of gives him sort of a shrug. Tim says something to him to the effect of cut it out or none of that or something like that. And that's when the man turns his bike around towards Tim, almost challenging him for saying something.
throws his bicycle down. And immediately this individual gets right in the face of Tim Heyman. The two of them start arguing. Basically saying, what's up with you? And then the other would say, I don't know, what's up with you? Are you going to do something? Are you going to do something? In a sort of like playground fashion like you would see in high school or something.
They kind of square off with one another in this borderline cartoonish version where they both got their fists balled up in the air and they're hopping back and forth like two boxers in a ring. Until you see the individual on the bicycle fake a punch at Tim, that's really what escalates this verbal confrontation into kind of a physical confrontation between the two.
They both get a couple of punches in. It didn't get too serious, but there were some blows exchanged. And I think the most serious was at one point in time, Tim Heyman got the individual from the bicycle into like a headlock and was able to kind of land one punch to the individual during the scuffle. And at that point, three other guys also on bicycles pulled up.
One of them had tried to break up the fight. One of them kind of came involved in the fight a little bit.
That's when Christina stepped in to try to break it all up, and she became very vocal herself. As Christina encouraged the guys to just get back on their bikes and go, one of them walked up to her and slapped her in the face. She didn't back down. She didn't turn and walk away. She started to yell, like, get out of here. Let's just let this move on. And it was at that point that both Christina and Tim started to go back inside. Then as Tim was approaching the stairs, the suspect began yelling at them.
And then just out of nowhere, he pulls this gun out of either like his waistband or a pocket of his pants. And he points it where Tim and Christina are. And he fired several shots at Tim using a .40 caliber semi-automatic weapon.
The shooter fired five shots, but only one hit Tim. And the bullet went into the kind of lower right side of his back and traveled up through his right lung, his aorta, his left lung, and sort of came out the upper side of his left chest. So it went through both lungs and pierced through his heart as well.
And it was then that now all the guys on the bicycles left. Christina's left cradling Tim in her arms on the sidewalk, trying to give him CPR. Their daughter, that five-year-old little girl, was inside the house. It received quite a bit of press, just the sort of senseless nature of it. A lot of the new residents of the Eastside held this out as an example of why they needed more of a law enforcement presence.
You know, Scott, when I was thinking about this, is that you know that they had this physical altercation after they had had words. And now it's not just the guy on the bike and Tim, because now there's onlookers, friends of his. And remember, after the one blow, it's basically Tim that we hear has this guy in a headlock at some point and actually connects a punch. Well, that to me is wounded ego. So it's not just his own wounded ego, but it's in front of other people.
And I think we have both seen and talked about cases just like this, when it is that wounded ego that all of a sudden turns to deadly violence. It's the reputation of the person who's involved in the altercation that he allowed somebody to hit him, and that punch went unanswered. So he ramped it up from a physical fight with fists to pulling out a weapon and pulling the trigger. There's just no better example of a murder that
was senseless. There was no reason that this had to go down like this. And so while through these people that were outside at the time or inside looking out, we do have a pretty detailed play-by-play of Tim's final moments in life. And also it was some insight into what was the likely motive. But the thing that we don't have that investigators didn't have was they didn't have much even of a description of the shooter to go on.
They had claimed never to have seen the person on the bike before and never got a good enough look of the person on the bike to give an identification later to law enforcement. They were able to very generically describe the person as a young, skinny male. But the fact that the scene was so chaotic so quickly, they really weren't even able to give good descriptions any more than that.
But that wouldn't be for long, because investigators do get a clue about the shooter's identity. - Because this area is an area of town known to be an area with an elevated crime rate, there are cameras everywhere.
We talk a lot about the value of surveillance cameras in homicide investigations. And in the years past, they were a fixture in certain locations like airports, convenience stores, banks. But as technology progressed, more homes have been outfitted with home security cameras.
almost all of the cameras, which give a view of the exterior of the home, which naturally captures events with a wide view. In 2020, listen to this, police forces across the United States made more than 20,000 requests for footage captured by rings, video doorbells, and other home security cameras. I mean, Scott, 20,000 requests. That's unbelievable, but 20,000 opportunities to ID a suspect in a case.
And so immediately they start fanning out, going to the different locations that they know there's video surveillance. And very quickly they get buy-in from the community and very quickly they obtain video from all over the area and are able to determine which sources of video are going to be relevant to this investigation.
In the video, you don't see his face, but you do see a clear identifiable feature that will be investigators' biggest break.
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He lived two houses down and he had captured the incident on a cell phone. From his vantage point, you could see what Tim was doing just before the shots occurred. You could see that definitely from the cell phone video that Tim's back was to the shooter when the shooting occurred. In addition to that, there was surveillance video from the local grocery store and lots of video evidence from residents' own home surveillance systems.
Unlike most cases where people just hear about a crime happening, in this particular case, everyone got to see and hear it happening. Which, of course, had a much more profound effect on people than just reading words on a page.
And that really started a different type of debate because now it isn't people just hearing about it. Now they're watching it and they are seeing the impact of, in this case, gun violence and how it is impacting their community. And if I remember correctly reading that Charleston, this was their sixth homicide of that year, which was a lot for them at the time. And when you look at the various news coverage, you do notice that some stations decided not to show information
the portion where the gun is being fired while others chose to do it. So there are some sensational portions of the broadcast which show the shooting, but of course you don't see the victim going down because that angle wasn't available. But still, when you put something like that out, it's the responsibility of the community to determine how to take the temperature down.
It hit social media before I think even the traditional media put it out there. So I think what initially hit the community was sort of the novelty of, oh, my God, this is a horrible crime that's almost instantaneously out there on video and you can watch it. You know, when looking at this video and Scott and I have both seen it and really two things stood out to me.
is that just like it's described, you can see that the words are making what's happening between these two guys more heated.
But, you know, Scott, I noticed Tim kind of jumped back quickly and you can't see you only see the back of the shooter. But something happened that made Tim jump back. And that was interesting to me because I wondered what it was that kind of was starting because we know within minutes Christina and Tim are trying to get back into the house when we now see that same guy firing a gun. Right. We know what we see, but we don't know what they're saying.
So potentially it's the words that were exchanged that may have given Tim an opportunity to say, you know what, this isn't worth it. My daughter's in the house. So we're just going to walk away from this. The first question they want to answer and the most important question is, who is this person on the video that fired these shots? While the video does not provide a good look at the shooter's face, it does show the clothing he's wearing.
He was wearing basically what not to wear if you planned to commit a crime. It was incredibly distinctive clothing. He had on a leather Louis Vuitton baseball-style hat.
that had a gold LV logo that was metallic on the front of it. He was wearing a black Fendi t-shirt that not only had a large Fendi logo across the chest, it also had all over it smaller logos on
two-tone jeans that were dark on the top half and light under the knee. And those jeans had a pretty distinctive three tears on the left leg of the jeans, as well as turquoise and white tennis shoes that were pretty recognizable and distinctive. You begin to determine the direction of travel and find out in your timeline if any other cameras in the area may have captured a better view of the man on a bike based on that clothing description.
We sent officers and detectives out to canvas that entire area for video footage. So we actually found there's a store nearby there, and we ended up seeing him a few hours prior to, and actually a few minutes prior to the murder, out front of the store. So right off the bat, you had the individual who shot him, you had almost his entire afternoon was captured
We talked to the store owner and the clerk, but he didn't know his name.
You know, Scott, I think throwing this to you about going through a bit what investigators' next steps would be as they now try to find this guy wearing this clothing that they've seen on the tape. I mean, clearly, I would obtain a still photograph of the best shot I had from the surveillance video of that person. And I would send my team up and down Hanover Street and in the surrounding neighborhood to learn and gather what other information there was.
people may have about who this shooter is. - This was sort of an all hands on deck sort of crime. So they really did act quickly. They called in detectives from different units, not just the homicide detectives, but other units as well and really shanned out. They put out a sort of bolo to every officer from a street level up to detective that worked a lot in the east side and asked for identifications.
And investigators did get information pretty quickly, but it wasn't from civilians or people that lived or frequented those areas. One was from an officer that was just a patrol officer in the area and had several interactions with an individual and was able to say that he believed that was the person. The second was from a parole officer who looked at the video and said that he believed he knew the identification of the person.
These two professionals, and think of who they are, parole and a patrol officer who have dealt with someone in their professional capacities, i.e., let's be real here, it's with someone being arrested before, that they're saying, hey, that guy looks like someone that we have dealt with, so it's got to be him. Like any defense attorney is going to be able to obliterate that evidence in court.
Both of these identifications were not the types that are very effective in a courtroom, in that the identifications were based sort of on build, the way the person carried themselves. So it isn't going to be for the courtroom, but it still is going to be helpful to investigators at least to know where to start to look. The name they gave was of a known person in the area named Shannon Johnson.
As it turns out, Shannon Johnson was no stranger to the Charleston Police Department. He had a criminal record dating back to when he was very young. He had a possession of crack and a failure stop for a blue light. And I should note, he was never convicted of either of those. Now, what Elizabeth did next was not only interesting, but just plain smart. I did a lot of social media scouring.
Beth is very savvy when it comes to sort of social media of the day, and she just began a search that would be pretty rudimentary to a teenager today. And she just began scouring the popular social media sites for any accounts that were assigned the name Shannon Johnson.
The goal here is to get as much intel about Shannon Johnson as you can. Perhaps find photographs with other people who were involved in his life that you could approach. Or as we've seen in other cases, photos of your lead suspect holding a handgun and boasting what he's done.
You know, someone might have the question, well, okay, if they have this path that's giving them the name Shannon Johnson, why not just get a picture of Shannon Johnson and then put him in a photo array or a live lineup or some other identification procedure to see if he can be ID'd? Well, that would be great if they had a witness who said that they thought they could make an ID, but they had quite the opposite. They had people that said that while they saw things...
including Christina and the neighbor that were right next door or upstairs, that everything happened so quickly and they were so, you know, frazzled, for lack of a better word, and upset that they didn't think they'd be able to make any idea at all. So really the problem with doing that is really all you're asking for is a problem with an identification, either a no-hit or even worse, a misidentification, because you have people who say they just can't do it.
Now, I took a look at Facebook and tried to look up Shannon Johnson, and it's a very common name, obviously. But once I narrowed it down using the city of Charleston and the fact that he was a male, because most of the Shannon Johnsons I found were women, I
I quickly came up with his Facebook page. I didn't even go that deep, Scott. I did the Facebook search. I saw there was 90 of them when I counted them all. And I was like, oh, this is why this is a really hard task. And I was glad that it was Sergeant Wolfson doing it, not me. But apparently it could have been you too. Since you found it, what did the Facebook profile say or show you? Obviously, I'm not friends with that page. But the last post I saw was in 2017.
He has a bunch of videos posted, a bunch of photographs. On the surface, it seemed like any other teen who posts on Facebook. But remember, there are fake pages too. And so when I started looking through the photos on this page, I saw that Louis Vuitton cap. It made me feel confident that it was his account.
The thing with social media is that it's not like the Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, that is regulating that they know that the person they are taking the photograph of at least should be the person who is matching up with the ID. I mean, you could put any picture up as your profile picture and it just goes unfettered, at least until challenged if you have put up something of someone else and they say, hey, that's me, not you.
And so Sergeant Wolfson filed the search warrant with Facebook and obtained both the public and private aspects of the profile account belonging to Shannon Johnson. And we got one key piece of evidence from the private messages, and that was a private message from Facebook Messenger sent from Shannon Johnson's mother to him just a couple of days prior to the murder.
Remember, investigators did know that Shannon Johnson had prior offenses, and it was already in the court system. Shannon's mother had received a court notice that Shannon was to report to court for a previous criminal incident involving a failure to stop for a blue light. And when she received that in the mail at her house, she took a picture of it with her phone and sent it to Shannon through Facebook Messenger.
So the message from his mom seemed to really enforce the fact that they had the right person and they had an official government document to prove it. It really doesn't get much better than that. When you think about it, it's not like they had all these photographs or even a picture of a house that you can now link to him. They had a government document with his name, his address coming from his mom.
On a scale of 1 to 10, Anasika, I gave it a 10. Oh, that's pretty good. I was going to give it a 9, but only because I rarely give a 10. But I think you might be right. It's about as good as it gets. Yeah, I mean, think about the lineage, the connection, his mother. Good circumstantial evidence, but it really helps to have the connection between family members. Listen what else they found that was posted after the crime.
It turns out that about an hour and a half after the murder, Shannon Johnson must have been pretty happy with his outfit that day because he had someone snap a picture of him in a chair. Where he's wearing the entire outfit. Photographs from the day. In fact, hours just after the murder. Shannon Johnson wearing that designer cap with the LV up on top, the two-tone colored jeans with the one leg ripped in three sections.
You know, again, sending this picture to a girl he was dating at the time with the message of, yo, make this your profile picture. When I saw that and heard it, I was like, what? I mean, is this posturing, boosting or someone that's just not that sharp? You know, either way, I say, thank you. We'll take it. There's no doubt about it. This is the person that police were searching for. That's a very strong piece of evidence.
So now they had found the Facebook account of Shannon Johnson, but what they really needed to find was Shannon Johnson himself. It seems like there's more enough to bring charges against Shannon Johnson here. You have the video evidence and you have the witnesses. But as you said, Anasika, they really need to find him. And just think about it. You just shot a man on the street during the day in front of witnesses. Instinctively, your first steps would be to run and hide.
They don't know where Shannon Johnson is. And so Elizabeth Wolfson keeps very close tabs on that Facebook account. So as I'm monitoring this account, he posts a photo of himself. I remember thinking at the time, like, this can't be real.
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He was wearing like this bright blue shirt, said polo on it, and then he had on these pants that were like floral pattern and they were like bright blue, bright orange, bright yellow. It almost, it was like surreal. And then another picture of him posing standing at a wall, a wall that Elizabeth recognized. And I could tell that it was in an apartment complex that I know from working downtown.
Sergeant Wolfson recognized it very quickly to be the public housing maybe half a mile from the location of the shooting, known as Bayside.
That to me, Scott, when I heard it, like she recognizes the building. Again, we're talking about a city. We're not talking about a one street town, but she actually recognized the building from the wall. It's almost what not to do if you're planning on committing a murder. And I'm not making light of it, but he's making it way too easy for investigators not only to pinpoint him to committing a murder, but finding him.
If I just shot somebody, I'm not going to be putting myself out into the world. I'm going to be hiding. It almost made me second guess myself a little bit of like, I do have the right guy here, right? So immediately she sends marshals working in conjunction with Charleston Police Department over to the Bayside Public Housing. And there is a guy there that looks just like that Facebook photo. She does see the officers approach him.
And if we were playing chess, this right now is checkmate. And Johnson has nowhere to hide. As other officers kind of came into the area and went to go make contact with him. But when you can't hide, you run. He took off running. The officers begin to chase him. Runs around to the back of the complex. He goes over a fence.
The person you're attempting to place into custody may think they can outrun a deputy or a police officer, but they quickly realize that outrunning a dog is often unrealistic. Now, I can tell you from personal experience, if a fleeing suspect chooses to hide, the dog can track the act of scent, and when the alert to the handler comes of a find,
a very effective announcement is made. And it's something like this. Sheriff's Office K-9, this is a warning. Come out slowly. Show us your hands or I will release my dog and he will bite you. All the way, the dog himself or herself is being very verbal. And in most cases, that is more than enough to get someone to surrender.
They released a canine or threatened to release the canine. And he sort of stops his flight and then is apprehended without incident at that point. Once he's in custody, police sit down with the hopes of interviewing Johnson. And here they're really looking for anything, just trying to get him to admit that these different photographs and video are of him.
It was a very long interview. I talked to him for, gosh, a couple hours at least, maybe three hours. He was very animated, angry. Everything, it was like people were out to get him. He felt like people were out to get him. Like, you know, how dare we accuse him of this? And he did acknowledge that that was his Facebook account. He made admissions that it was him in the video.
So while they have this at least potential great evidence, ultimately prosecutors had to decide if they were going to use it. And let me just give you a little bit more here is that, you know, before you speak to someone in custody, we all know that you get your Miranda warnings. And there was something about the rights or the way that he answered the questions that would translate.
termed equivocal, that it wasn't a straight out sure, whether it's because he at some point asked for an attorney and then changed his mind. Well, you can't do that. While we don't know the exact circumstances, there was some sort of issue with that Miranda portion of his statement that prosecutors decided that if this case went to trial and if they got a conviction that it might be an appellate issue big enough to potentially get the case reversed.
It's probably one of the hardest decisions a prosecutor has to make, leaving evidence on the table and not using it in your trial. So we thought the issue with the admissions and confessions was a close one enough, and we thought our evidence was good enough without it that we just sort of gritted our teeth and just made the tough call to go forward without using any of the interview. Now Johnson was arrested on August 12th, 2019.
He was charged with murder and the possession of a weapon during a violent crime. And typically, it takes months before the case goes to trial. And as the months go by, this homicide case, like all homicide cases across the nation, faced a problem.
The pandemic. And just like the pandemic shut down much of this country and actually the world, it definitely shut down the courts. It was a full stop. We had no trials for I think about a year and a half.
You had cases that were being delayed because of COVID. There was concerns about COVID restrictions being in the courtroom for witnesses, for juries, obviously for judges. Everyone was concerned about the problem with COVID. But also on the prosecution side, there was concerns about even eventual mistrials because of the speedy trial rule. I mean, how often...
Would you find a situation where you're closing down courtrooms for months at a time and not being able to get through that speedy trial rule? Well, again, the federal government, they basically got rid of that. And they said that this was a national emergency, so you didn't have to worry about that piece.
But you could still have a mistrial if all of a sudden you couldn't find your witnesses. Remember, years actually went by. You know, it was well over a year, year and a half before anything opened back up as far as trial. So you also had people sitting in jail for all that time. Because so you really on both sides of the aisle had a lot of things going on and a lot of considerations that it was no good and very problematic once it started again.
And once administrators determined it was safe to resume all trials, the courts were opening back up and some cases were reassigned, including the Johnson case, which would land in the lap of Chad Simpson.
There was another prosecutor assigned initially named David Osborne, and I came on and took the case over about midway through. As I read through the case, honestly, it made me angry to lose a human life over something so silly and a confrontation so juvenile just seemed to be such a tragedy.
Anastasia, have you had cases that have been reassigned to you? Sure, right? Tons. Tons. Tons. We all do. So, Anastasia, what are the challenges when you have a case reassigned and falls in your lap?
Well, I think when you get that box handed to you, at least in the case of a homicide, it's often a box that you already feel that you're starting from behind because all this work has been done before. Rapport has been built with witnesses and potential people involved in the cases that you just don't quite get it the way that you do when you have it from the beginning. But I will say by the time you get into the courtroom, I always found that at that point, you ended up knowing that case as well as if you'd picked it up day one.
Whenever families hear that a new prosecutor has been assigned, the assumption is that it's a new person that doesn't know what they're doing, somebody that's right out of law school, someone that isn't up to the task or someone that's going to just deal it away sort of behind closed doors. So you want to be proactive and assertive.
And I was very lucky in that I was personally good friends with the previous prosecutor, and we reached out to key family members together. He let all the families know that I was somebody who was capable, and it meant a lot. I mean, and back to prosecutors for a second. I'm sure the caseload would be piling up as well because of the delays and the closures of the court system.
I think everyone was just underwater because everything was ready to go at once and yesterday and the year before. So every judge is like, go, go, go, go, go. And you have to prioritize, but you can't prioritize when every case matters. Every person matters. So really, people were just incredibly overwhelmed.
We were asked the week before to try another case of almost of the same serious nature. At any given time, I'm averaging about 400 charges at any one given time and trying to triage and juggle all that together. It can be quite stressful for both prosecutors and public defenders. And finally, the case we're talking about today went to trial only three months ago in December of 2022.
Chad is very good at what he does. His methodology was getting in all these videos at the store all the way down the street through four or five or six different camera angles and the cell phone video. It almost created like a visual timeline. And so the jurors, they were able to see everything almost like real time as though they were watching a movie or a video of what happened.
At trial, the defense went in a direction that wasn't expected. Rather than poking holes at the Facebook verifications and witness accounts, they went somewhere else. Ultimately, they decided to go more with this was not a murder. It was either self-defense or a voluntary manslaughter. I think both of them just are so bogus.
So the defense raised an interesting issue, trying to suggest that one person looks at a video and interprets it one way and another could completely think something different. And they were hoping that that in within itself would find two jurors who did not agree. They argued that essentially the scuffle between the two that preceded the shooting
Particularly the moment where Tim Heyman had Shannon Johnson in a headlock and landed probably the best punch of the scuffle, sort of hit him on the head while he had him in a headlock, was one of two things. Either enough...
legal provocation to have led to a heat of passion on Shannon Johnson's part for this crime to have in fact been a voluntary manslaughter and not a murder under the law. Or secondarily, they made an attempt to make this a self-defense case. The important things that you definitely see in the video is that Tim has nothing in his hands. I believe that in SIGA, both those theories were crushed by a single report. The
the ME's report or the medical examiner's report because the report confirmed that Tim was facing away from the shooter when he was struck with a bullet in the back that exited his chest. So clearly he could not have been a threat at that very moment.
In Chad's closing statement, he stood silently for the amount of time between when the fight ended and when the gunshots happened, which is a pretty long time. Just terrible. I mean, you know, it's like even when he pulls the gun out, you can see he looks like he thinks about it. Like, he doesn't pull the gun out and fire the shots right away. It's a few seconds pass by. He's pointing this gun at these people who see the gun and are legitimately running for their lives.
After a week-long trial, the jury walked back into the courtroom with their verdict. They found him guilty of murder and possession of a weapon during a violent crime. Shannon Johnson was sentenced to 50 years. And while that was the end of the case, it is not the end of the story.
At the start of the episode, we talked about how Timothy's murder was just the beginning of a series of unfortunate events. And that's because before Shannon Johnson was ever convicted, another life was taken. During those three years while the trial was delayed, a lot of things changed. Chad took the reins of the case, and he also had a chance to meet and get to know Tim's loved ones.
Tim's girlfriend, Christina, came and met with me like any main witness would a prosecutor. We'd met for about three hours and talked about her testimony and gotten her ready for testimony for a trial that was going to take place. Christina left her meeting with me and over that very weekend was in a car driven by her new boyfriend at the time. And her daughter was in the backseat.
On November 4th, 2021, they were all in a car driving along I-26. And according to reports, Christina's boyfriend collided with another car. And so after the accident, which by all reports was nothing serious at all, he left the scene. But that quickly escalated from an accident to road rage. And the other driver had a gun. And the other driver followed,
The other driver fired into the car, attempting to shoot her boyfriend. And fired five shots into the car, hitting Christina in the neck and shoulder. Her daughter, then just seven years old, was in the backseat when it happened. I found out about it like the day after it happened. And I called Chad and I said, hey, I think you should know about this. And he was even kind of distraught. He's like, I just met with her. It was...
Some of the most heartbreaking information I had ever received. And sadly, this little girl who was in the house again when her father was senselessly killed by gunfire was in the backseat of the car just a couple of years later when her mother was killed in another senseless act of gun violence.
This, to me, was like the hardest piece of covering this case. Every bit of it is sad and awful and tragic. Just think about the terror of the accident and this car chase and now bullets firing and what must have happened when her mom was hit. And it's almost too much to think about. It's devastating. It's devastating. My heart absolutely goes out to her and her family.
In the 2021 incident, both the shooter and Christina's boyfriend were arrested. The shooter was charged with voluntary manslaughter and possession of a gun in a violent crime, while the boyfriend was charged with involuntary manslaughter and assault. And that's basically because whatever went on with these two cars, whether it's chicken or who should have done what when, is that under the law, at least for the charges, they were both believed to have some culpability for Christina's death.
When I think about this case, I just keep thinking about anger and guns. And wherever you come out on guns, gun control, whether it's the right to bear arms or just getting rid of them all, I think the one thing that we should all agree on, or I hope we all do, is that anger and guns is all too often a lethal combination. And this little girl lost her dad, Tim, and her mom, Christina, because of it.
We also learned that despite all of the tragedies this little girl faced, she's doing well. She loves puzzles, Lego, and drawing. Christina had a sister who was very stable and loving and had a very solid, stable home. And the last I heard was that that little girl was taken in by her sister.
She has pictures of her mom in the dining room, along with a hand-painted porcelain plate that reads, Happy Mother's Day. Both Tim and Christina had goals to put their daughter first and provide her with a warm home and life filled with love. But because of two different men, both in very different situations, with no commonality other than their hands had a gun and their minds were filled with rage...
that her life will be forever changed. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Forseti Media. Ashley Flowers and Sumit David are executive producers. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.
Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday. Already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts.
