The evidence against Jason Anthony Warren piled up during the sixth day of his trial for two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. The evidence presented today in court included extensive security camera footage placing Warren at the scene of one of those murders, plus an audio recording of one victim crying out the name “Jason” as she was killed and a sheriff’s investigator testifying that she recognized Warren on camera leaving immediately afterwards with a large sword in his hand.

Warren has been charged with murdering Hoopa resident Dorothy Ulrich on Sept. 27, 2012, and later the same day deliberately running over three women and a dog as they ran on Myrtle Ave. near Eureka, killing Suzanne Seemann and the dog and seriously injuring her companions.

The testimony picked up today with Robert Kane, Sr. the retired former chief of police for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, who testified that he’s known Warren since he (Warren) was a teenager. And in the courtroom this morning Kane watched footage captured from the four-camera security system that had been mounted outside the Ulrich home. It was the same footage he watched on the day of the murder, though Kane said the resolution of the footage was better back then.

In the footage, a man can be seen walking across the frame, from left to right. Prosecutor Paul Sequeira asked Kane what his initial reaction to the video was.

“When I saw it I blurted out that it was Jason Warren,” Kane said.

Under cross-examination from defense attorney Glenn Brown, Kane said he’d seen footage of Warren from at least two different cameras, and again he noted, “The resolution was a lot clearer than what I saw right here.”

Under redirect from Sequeira, Kane said that he probably couldn’t ID Warren strictly from the footage shown in court today — a moment that foreshadowed some testimony that would come later in the day.

The prosecution then called Humboldt County Sheriff’s Investigator Cheryl Magnusson-Franco, who in 2012 was assigned to be the agency’s primary investigator for the Ulrich murder. She recounted the initial stages of her investigation, which included interviews with people on the scene, a preliminary search of the premises and viewing photos of Ulrich’s body. 

Magnusson-Franco recalled interviewing Warren’s wife, Ti San Che Lincoln (nee Warren), about a series of calls she’d received on her cell phone the morning of the murder from a land line in Eureka. Later testimony would reveal that these calls came from Jason Warren, who at the time was holed up with friend Eddie Koch, Jr., at Koch’s grandparents’ home.

Koch, it should be noted, remains missing after disappearing midway through his testimony during a brief court break on Monday.

The bulk of Magnusson-Franco’s testimony consisted of her recounting everything she found recorded by the security cameras at the Ulrich house between roughly 8 a.m. on Sept. 26, 2012, through Ulrich’s murder around 4:30 the following morning.

In the morning of the 26th, Ulrich could be seen leaving her property in the Kia Spectra she’d borrowed from a friend, returning alone shortly thereafter. She left again at 9:13 a.m. and returned almost half an hour later with Warren in the passenger seat. He was wearing the same black-and-red athletic shorts and same high-top sneakers that he would be arrested in the following day.

Throughout the day and into the night, Warren could be seen walking around the property, going in and out of the double-wide trailer, smoking on the porch and walking back and forth in the direction of neighbor Tiffany Martin’s property. At 11:02 a.m., Magnusson-Franco testified, Warren climbed a ladder outside the property to fix one of the security cameras, and in the process the camera captured a close-up of Warren’s face and clear views of his clothing. Warren remounted the camera so it would function correctly and then climbed back down the ladder.

Shortly before 9 p.m., the video showed a vehicle arriving. It was the Ulriches’ son, Shane, Magnusson-Franco said. Shane hung around the property until a little after 10 p.m., when he returned to his vehicle. Around the same time, Ulrich and Warren got into the Kia, with Warren in the passenger seat, and drove away, coming back with grocery bags just a few minutes later.

Security footage from the nearby Hoopa minimart confirmed that Ulrich and Warren had gone there together at that time, Magnusson-Franco said. As the night wore on, Warren continued to mill about the property, walking through the driveway, picking up boxes and talking to Ulrich.

The investigator didn’t note any significant activity between 2:41 a.m. and 4:21 a.m.. That’s when the security system captured audio of Dorothy Ulrich being brutally murdered. The sound of the attacks lasted for about four minutes, and then, at 4:31 a.m., Warren could be seen walking out of the trailer and heading south, carrying a purse or bag in his left hand and, in his right, the alleged murder weapon, a long sword in its scabbard, Magnusson-Franco testified.

At 4:32 a.m. the system picked up clanging sounds. At 4:34, the sound of someone walking on gravel and more clanging sounds. One camera showed the Kia’s headlights coming on, the glow from the brake pedal being applied and then the headlights going off again. At 4:35, the Kia started, backed up and turned around, then headed southbound on Highway 96, Magnusson-Franco said.

After the lunch break, the jury got to see most of the clips the investigator had described, including the close-up of Warren’s face, the footage of him coming and going throughout the day, and the dim footage of someone walking out of the trailer and driving away around 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 27. Sequeira followed that video footage with the audio captured by one of the cameras during the attack. 

Unwilling to listen to that attack, Dorothy Ulrich’s mother and two other women got up to leave before the recording began. Magnusson-Franco said the track had been sent to the FBI to clarify the sound by reducing the background noise.

It was the same gruesome audio played during opening arguments on the first day of the trial, and on second listen I heard something that I wasn’t sure I’d heard the first time: Between the repeated percussive striking sounds and Ulrich’s panicked pleas to stop, she could be heard saying the name “Jason” at least three times. Ulrich cried out in pain and asked, “What are you doing? Hey! Please stop! Please stop! Please!” And then she clearly said, “Jason, what are you doing? Jason! What are you doing?”

Her pleas and cries lasted for close to a minute, and she called out “Jason” at least once more between groans. Her last coherent words were, “I can’t do this.” A man’s voice said, “Be quiet,” and Ulrich soon fell silent. But the striking sounds continued.

As the audio played, one juror put her head in her hand.

Magnusson-Franco said she counted between 59 and 65 audible strikes or smacks on the recording. And she said she didn’t hear Dorothy Ulrich say any other name besides “Jason.” From the time Warren left in the Kia until the California Highway Patrol showed up after 9 a.m., she said, she didn’t see anybody arrive on or leave from the property.

Throughout the day, Brown didn’t seem to have much to work with on cross-examination, but he diligently searched for cracks through which to inject doubt. He asked Magnusson-Franco about headlights that passed by the property on nearby Highway 96, and he peppered her with questions about whom she’d interviewed and where there might be blind spots in the security cameras’ fields of vision.

And then Brown queued up his own 20-minute stretch of the security video — marked as “Defense Exhibit EE” — which was a single-camera shot captured from 3:43 a.m. to 4:03 a.m. the morning of the murder. It was a grainy black-and-white video in which remarkably little occurred. 

The shot appeared to be from the camera facing the driveway, and shortly after the footage began rolling a motion-sensor light came on. A dog barked once and then again. Minutes passed by with nothing happening. The sound of a passing car could be heard in the distance. After a while, the dog barked again.

At one point, a dog walked into the frame, stopped partway behind a bush for a while and then walked entirely behind the bush. This was followed by several more minutes in which virtually nothing happened. The jury started to get fidgety. One juror’s notebook slipped off her lap and onto the floor. Another took a long sip of water.

The dog appeared again, and barking could be heard, both near and off in the distance. A juror rubbed his forehead with the back of his pen, and another took off her glasses to rub her eyes. In the video, the motion-sensor light switched off for a few minutes, then came back on again. The dog barked again a few times. 

Finally the video ended.

Brown asked Magnusson-Franco about the motion-light coming on: Had she seen anyone in any of the four cameras during those times?

She checked her notes and said, no, nothing she’d noted.

Brown asked if she’d heard the faint noises, like somebody hitting something lightly.

Magnusson-Franco said it sounded like the dog’s chain, or maybe the dog going into its doghouse.

“What do you suppose got the dog to bark?” Brown asked.

Magnusson-Franco responded, “Lots of things can make a dog bark at night,” and there was some light laughter in the courtroom. Brown had made no apparent headway in countering the evidence.

The final witness of the day was Warren’s wife, Ti San Che Warren, though she now uses the last name Lincoln. Seeming a bit uncomfortable on the stand, Lincoln said she and Warren were married in 2007, lived together for only about six months or so (she had trouble remembering) and then separated around 2010 — “sort of.” They saw each other on and off after that, she explained.

Sequeira pressed her about why they hadn’t lived together more during their marriage. “I was living at my mother’s,” she said, and then just as Brown asked Judge Timothy Cissna if counsel could approach, Lincoln said of Warren, “He was incarcerated.”

Counsel approached the bench, whispered with the judge awhile and returned to their desks.

Lincoln then testified that in September 2012 she was living in Weitchpec, which had no cell phone service. On Sept. 27, the morning of the murders, as she was driving to the College of the Redwoods campus in Hoopa, she saw that she’d gotten a voicemail form Warren but immediately deleted it when she heard his voice. She didn’t want to hear from him, she said.

But the calls from Warren — which originated from a Eureka landline — kept coming, and she finally spoke with him. Later that day, she said, she went to Eureka with a friend and stopped by the spot where Warren was holed up, at Eddie Koch, Jr.’s grandparents’ house. 

Lincoln said she and her friend picked Warren up that afternoon but only got about three blocks before they were “swarmed by a bunch of cops.” 

Sequeira asked if she remembered telling Detective Franco that Warren initially said not to pull over.

“I honestly don’t recall,” Lincoln said.

Then Sequeira asked if she remembered being shown a surveillance video and being asked to identify someone in it. She said she did, and Sequeira prepared to show her the surveillance video again. The footage was the same from this morning, a rather washed-out clip in which a figure can be seen moving from left to right.

“This looks a lot different than the other video,” Lincoln said. Like Kane earlier, she told Sequeira that the picture wasn’t nearly as clear as she remembered. “I can’t say the same thing I did last time,” Lincoln said, evidently in reference to her preliminary trial testimony.

Sequeira, who has seemed confident throughout the trial, now appeared stymied. He had the footage played again and asked Lincoln if she recognized the man who walked through the frame.

“It looks like it may be my husband,” she said uncertainly.

Sequeira was clearly frustrated. He asked (over Brown’s objection) if she remembered testifying about this at the preliminary hearing. She said the video then was bigger, and she could see better because it had been dark in the courtroom.

Sequeira asked if that would help, but Judge Cissna cut things off, saying that would have to wait as it was time to wrap up the day’s hearing. And so the day ended on something of a cliffhanger: Warren’s wife, who had evidently positively identified him as the man in the security footage at a preliminary hearing, said she couldn’t quite do so in the actual case. 

She’s scheduled to return to the stand when the case resumes Monday morning at 9:30.

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