BRAIN SCANS FOR ATHENA'S KILLER, FOOLIO'S HUNTERS ON TRIAL & DAD WHO BURIED HIS KIDS DODGES DEATH

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice for Thursday, April thirtieth, twenty twenty six. Three stories today, three death penalty cases, three different ways. The criminal justice system is trying to figure out what to do with people who have done genuinely indefensible things to children. And I want to tell you upfront, I am not going to make this a clean half hour. There is no clean version of any of this. In Fort Worth, the defense for Tanner Lynn Horner has been running for over a week now. You remember Tanner Horner, the FedEx contract driver who admitted he hit seven year old Athena Strand with his van, panicked, put her in the truck, and killed her. He pleaded guilty April seventh.

0:53 The jury is now deciding whether he lives or dies, and his defense team has spent the last week parading every every adult Tanner Horner ever knew past, the witness stand, the fifth grade teacher, the speech pathologist, the pastor, the childhood best friend, the brain scientist, building the mitigation case of their lives. In Tampa, opening statements just wrapped in the trial of four men accused of murdering Jacksonville drill rapper Julio Fulio at his twenty sixth birthday party. We brought you this case in October twenty twenty five, when his girlfriend, Alicia Andrews was convicted of manslaughter for her role. Now her boyfriend Isaiah Chance is on trial alongside three other men. They all face the death penalty. And in Springfield, Georgia, a courtroom in Effingham County, Elwyn Crocker Senior stood up Monday and pleaded guilty to murdering both of his children, fourteen year old Jr. Thirteen year old Mary. He buried them in trash bags in his backyard. The prosecutor stood up afterward and said something I haven't heard a prosecutor say in a long time. He said, this is certainly not justice, and here is the kicker. He meant it three stories, three sets of children whose names you should know.

2:11 Athena Junior, Mary, and the people in Tampa whose lives were ripped apart on a Sunday morning at five am at a holiday inn. Let me walk you through it. This is methodical territory. Let's start in Texas because we are deep in this trial now, and I owe you the update if you're new, and if you are welcome, you've picked a heavy week. Tanner Lynn Horner is the FedEx contract delivery driver who killed Athena Strand on November thirtieth, twenty twenty two. Athena was seven years old. She lived in Cottondale, Texas. She had spent the day in her first grade classroom, came home, was sorting laundry in the storage shed that doubled as her bedroom, and she answered the door when a delivery man pulled up with a Walmart box of Barbies Christmas presents her stepmother had ordered.

3:07 Horner hit her with the van. She wasn't seriously hurt. He panicked. He got worried she would tell her father. He tried to break her neck in the back of the truck. When that didn't work, he strangled her with his hands. Then he dumped her body in the Trinity River, fifteen miles from her home, and went back to work delivering packages. On April seventh, before a single witness was called, he stood up in court and pleaded guilty. So this jury is not deciding whether he did it. They're deciding whether he lives or dies. Capital murder of a child under ten. In Texas, there are two sentences, death by lethal injection or life without parole. There is no third option.

3:51 The prosecution rested April sixteenth, after laying out their case in clinical devastating detail. They played the audio recording of a Athena's final moments. They put her parents on the stand. They walked the jury through the DNA evidence male DNA on Athena's body in places it should never have been on a seven year old girl. They showed the children's clothing investigators found at Horner's home. They put two women on the stand who said Horner had sexually assaulted them, one when she was sixteen and he was twenty one. The case the state put on was frankly overwhelming. And now we are in the defense's mitigation phase, which is what I want to walk you through tonight, because this is where capital cases get strange. Day eleven was last Friday.

4:38 Day twelve was Monday, and the defense is making the argument that this jury should look at Tanner Horner's life and conclude that the right sentence is life without parole instead of death. To do that, they have to humanize him. They have to find every adult who ever looked at Tanner Horner and saw something other than the man who killed Athena Strand. So they are braininging those people in on Friday Day eleven. They started with his fifth grade teacher. She didn't have him for a full year, didn't remember much about his home life, but she remembered Tanner struggled socially. Other kids thought he was odd. There was an incident where he came to school with shampoo still in his hair.

5:19 Picture that a ten year old boy showing up to fifth grade with shampoo dried into his hair because nobody at home noticed. Then Beth Weaver, a speech language pathologist, testified that she worked with Tanner around two thousand and three or two thousand and four when he was part of an in home facilitator program. She helped him with coping behaviors. He was a child who needed help coping. Then the defense brought out the heavy artillery doctor Jeffrey David Lewen, neuroscientist. He walked the jury through brain scans they had performed on Horner MRI PET And here's where the defensive strategy got interesting, because Louen had to be honest about something. The doctors who originally interpreted those scans, found nothing abnormal, no structural damage, no lesions, no obvious signs of brain injury. Lewen then said that he himself had identified abnormalities in what he called the social cognition system.

6:18 But he also conceded, and this is important, that those abnormalities would not impair Horner's ability to drive a van or read a map, Which is the defense quietly admitting that whatever's wrong in there, it didn't stop Tanner Horner from doing his job, from planning his route, from understanding what he was doing. Then doctor Aaron Bigler, a clinical neuropsychologist, gave a long overview of the brain the lobes, how MRI and pet and EEG work how toxic exposure and neurodevelopmental disorders can affect brain function. This is groundwork. The defense is laying the foundation for the argument they have been building from day one. That Tanner Horner's mother drank while she was pregnant with him, That he was exposed to massive amounts of lead as a child, That this is a damaged brain that cannot be held to the same standard as yours are mine. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you I take fetal alcohol exposure seriously. I take lead poisoning seriously. There are real, established, peer reviewed effects of those things on developing brains. The defense is not making things up out of whole cloth. There is a legitimate body of science here. But there is also a question that the prosecution is going to ask in closing arguments, and that question is, millions of people have difficult childhoods, millions of people have brain abnormalities. The vast

7:49 majority of them do not lure seven year old girls into delivery vans and strangle them with their hands. So what does any of this actually explain? Day twelve was two days ago in real time, and on Monday, the defense pivoted from doctors to people who actually knew Tanner Horner. This is, in some ways the more powerful testimony because it forces the jury to look at him as a human being. Marie, a special education professional whose last name was withheld, testified off camera. She said Tanner Horner was a special education student who was generally a pleasant young man. He could problem solve issues with other kids. He had a few rare incidents where he couldn't control his emotions and got physical, but most of his disciplinary issues were dress code violations. Then a man named Gary, Tanner's former pastor, took the stand, and this is where things got heavier.

8:48 Gary said Tanner was a kid like any other in the youth ministry, not disruptive, trying to find his place, a loner in his words. But then Gary said something that should land hard. He said Tanner became a different person when the VA changed his medication. He became angry, agitated, and listen to this. He had a bag with a sack of knives in it. That's the pastor, the man whose job it was to see the best in Tanner Horner, telling the jury off camera that the kid showed up to youth group with a bag of knives. Then Ruby took the stand. Ruby was Tanner Horner's best friend, going back to fifth grade. They hung out on the playground together, talked about Harry Potter, went to church together. They dated briefly in high school. Ruby described him as sweet, endearing, said he treated her well, was never violent toward her, and then she said they broke up because she wanted to date somebody else, and he got mad. That last detail he got mad is going to land with the jury.

9:53 Whether the defense intended it to or not, because that is the through line. Dan Her Horner is a man who, when something doesn't go his way, decides to control the situation. He couldn't keep Ruby, so he got mad. He couldn't accept that Athena Strand might tell her father he'd hit her with a van, so he killed her. Same impulse twenty years apart, taken to its monstrous conclusion. The day ended with doctor Amy Fritz, another speech language pathologist she had evaluated Horner, met with him for two days in jail, and she did something the defense really did not want her to do. She testified that her assessment of him change after she watched the abduction video. She said, the language he used in that van talking to Athena, the seven year old he was about to kill, turned and I am quoting court TV here horrific. She is the defense's own expert, and she had to look the jury in the eyes and tell them what was on that tape made her see him differently. That is where we are heading into Day thirteen, which started today. The defense is still putting on their case. Closing arguments and the jury's decision are still ahead. But the picture that's emerging from the witness stand is not the picture the defense wanted.

11:10 It's a picture of a man with real difficulties who also, for his entire life, has shown the same warning signs, a temper when things don't go his way, isolation, a sack of knives, a pattern. Nobody was paying attention to him. And here we are when we come back. Tampa, June twenty third, twenty twenty four, five am a holiday in parking lot and four men who prosecutors say drove three hundred miles to put a rapper in a coffin on his birthday. Returning listeners, you remember this case. October twenty twenty five, we brought you the original story. November twenty twenty five, we brought you the verdict on Alicia Andrews, the girlfriend of the lead defendant, convicted of manslaughter. February twenty twenty six, we brought you the appeals drama where her sentencing judge got removed. Now we are at the main event. The four men prosecutors say actually pulled the triggers, and the one who the state says told them where to point the guns. Quick refresher Charles Jones twenty six years Old performed under the name Juliofulio, Jacksonville drill rapper, documented member of a Jacksonville street gang called six Block.

12:32 Six Block was and is in an open shooting war with two rival factions in Jacksonville called Ace's Top Killers known as a t K, and another crew called twelve hundred. The rivalry plays out in the streets and on social media in equal measure, drill rap videos taunting dead rivals, post naming names, real bodies, virtual receipts. June twenty third, twenty twenty four, Fulio is in Tampa for his twenty six bay. He has been posting about the trip on Instagram, the Airbnb, the pool, party, the clubs, everywhere he is going. Around five am, he is in the parking lot of a holiday inn near the University of South Florida. Surveillance video from a home two suites next door captures what happens next. Vehicles pull up, men get out. They start shooting at the cars. Fulio and his group are in thirty one to nine millimeters shell casings recovered bullets in occupied hotel rooms bystanders shot. A bullet goes through an air conditioning unit and damages a family's betting while their kids are screaming. A wife on a college move in trip has burns on her leg from shrapnel, and Fulio is dead, found in a defensive position inside his own car.

13:46 On trial right now. Four men, Isaiah Chance twenty three, Sean Gathwright twenty Rashad Murphy thirty two, Davian Murphy twenty nine. All of them face the death penalty. The fifth defendant, Alicia Andrews, Chance's girlfriend, was tried separately last fall and got manslaughter. She was the only one not gang affiliated and the only one not on death row. The judge presiding here is Michelle Cisco, the same judge who handled Andrew's trial. The defense tried to get her removed for bias and won at the appeals court level on Andrews's sentencing, only she kept this case. Day one was last Tuesday.

14:27 Opening statements, the prosecution laid out a theory that should sound familiar if you've been following this kind of case. This was not a random shooting. This was a hunt. The state says these four men drove together from Jacksonville to Tampa, tracked Fulio through his Instagram posts, identified the hotel where he ended up waited for him in the parking lot and unloaded on his vehicle. Coordinated calculated team attack. One defendant, they say, kept firing a rifle at Fulio's dodge charger as it tried to ass escape the scene. Isaiah Chance's defense did what defendants in joint trials always do when they have the chance. They blamed the other guy.

15:10 Chance's lawyer pointed at Rashad Murphy and essentially said, that's your shooter. My client wasn't even there in any meaningful way. The state can't prove he intended a murder, can't prove he knew the plan, can't prove he did anything to help. Whether that flies with the jury is going to depend on what the prosecution puts up next day two, last Thursday, the state started building. Detective David Alverson walked the jury through the forensics. Thirty one casings on the ground, three shooters, two suspect vehicles, a Chevrolet Impala and a Chevrolet Cruise. And here's the modern detail. Investigators track the shooters using Tesla sentry mode footage from a car in the parking lot.

15:54 Tesla owners, your cars are basically rolling surveillance platforms. Now and detectives know it. The concussion from the rifle was apparently powerful enough to set off a different car's alarm. That's the kind of firepower we're talking about. Then they put on the bystanders. Camilla Bentley was on a girl's trip, sitting in a car at the hotel when bullets started flying. She got shot in the right arm, drove out of the chaos. Audra Agramante was helping her daughter move into us HAF staying at the hotel with her husband, woke up to gunshots, bullet through the window. Pablo Gabor was visiting Tampa with his family, children, panicked, crying. His wife had a burn on her leg from shrapnel. They thought it was a bomb. None of these people knew Charles Jones.

16:42 None of them were in any street beef. They were just people who picked the wrong hotel on the wrong night. Day three was Monday, and on Monday, the defense had its moment with Detective Richard Nieder, the Jacksonville gang investigator the state has been leaning on hard. The defense walked him through what's called drill rap and got him to concede on the stand that drill rap is often about trolling disrespect clout. He agreed that just because somebody raps about a killing doesn't mean they actually did it. That is a critical concession because the state is going to want to play music videos to this jury, show them lyrics about folio, show them taunts. The defense is now armed with the cops own admission that the lyrics aren't confessions. Then, on Monday afternoon, the state put on Officer Jael Baha Mundi, a Jacksonville officer, to walk the jury through the arrest of Rashad Murphy. License plate reader catches a vehicle tied to a Tampa felony at a hotel. Officers move in, Murphy gets out of the car, sees the guns and runs footchase. Officer deploys his taser. The first attempt fails, the second one connects, and here is the detail that's going to live forever in court. Reporter notes one of the hazer probes hit Rashad Murphy and the genitals unintentionally. Allegedly, of course it did. Look that's what happens when you run from the cops with a death penalty case waiting for you. The universe has a sense of humor, a

18:15 dark one. This trial is just getting started. Day four was today. Witnesses are going to keep coming. The state has a mountain of cell phone data, surveillance footage, Instagram records, and that critical Tesla footage. The defense has its drill rap isn't real argument, and it's blamed the other guy's strategy. We will keep you in the loop as it develops. And remember the names tonight, Charles Jones, he had problems, he had enemies, he was no choir boy. But also Camilla Bentley who flew to Tampa for a girl's trip and got shot in the arm. Audra Agramante helping her kid move into college. Pablo Gabby's wife with shrapnel burns.

18:55 They were paying attention to none of this. They got hit anyway. That's how it works. There is a playbook for this, and other people pay the price when we come back. The most disturbing case I have covered on this show in months a Georgia father, two children, trash bags, and a prosecutor who looked into the cameras Monday and said, this is certainly not just as. I want to give you a content warning before we get into this one. The next ten minutes contain extreme child abuse and torture. If you have kids in the room, this is the time to put earbuds in. If this is going to be too much for you tonight, skip the segment. I won't take it personally. We will be back tomorrow with something else. Springfield, Georgia, Effingham County. Monday, April twenty seventh, a man named Elwyn Crocker Senior, fifty seven years old, walked into a courtroom and pleaded guilty to murdering his two children, fourteen year old Elwyn Crocker Junior known as Jr.

20:03 Thirteen year old Mary Crocker. He pleaded guilty to two counts of malice murder, aggravated sexual battery, four counts of cruelty to children, two counts of concealing the death of another, two counts of false imprisonment. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, plus another life sentence plus another forty years, all to be served consecutively. He will die in prison. He will not be executed, and the district attorney for the Ogichi Judicial Circuit, Robert Busby, stood up at a press conference Monday afternoon and said something I want you to sit with. He said, this is certainly not justice, and frankly, based on the facts of this case, the death penalty would not have been justice.

20:46 He said, what these children went through, there is no punishment available under the law that would be justice in this case. That is a prosecutor telling you that the system he works for has nothing, not a needle, none, not a cell, not a sentence anyone could write that would equal what happened to Jr. And Mary Crocker. Let me tell you why, he said that. December twentieth, twenty eighteen, Effingham County Deputies got a tip from a relative who feared for the safety of a thirteen year old girl named Mary Crocker. Deputies showed up at the family's mobile home on Rosebud Place in Giton, Georgia and asked to see Mary. Her father, Elwyn Crocker Senior, told them she was out of town with her biological mother in South Carolina.

21:33 They pressed him, he cracked. He led them out to the backyard behind the trailer and pointed deputies doug. They found Mary buried under cement bags and trash bags, dressed in a diaper. Then they kept digging and they found her older brother j R. Last seen alive in November twenty sixteen. He had been buried out there for two years. Nobody had ever filed a missing person's report. The school had been told he was being homeschooled. That was that two years the day deputies found Mary's body December twentieth, twenty eighteen, and would have been her fourteenth birthday. Five adults lived in that house with those children, Elwyn Crocker Senior, the father, Candace Crocker, the stepmother, Mark Wright, Candace's brother, Kim Wright, Candace's mother, the children's step grandmother, and Roy Prater, kim Wright's boyfriend. All five of them were charged, and the picture that emerged through bond hearings, through years of court records, through Candace Crocker's own statements to investigators was unspeakable.

22:45 Prosecutors said the family systematically starved the kids, kept plenty of food for themselves, punished the children for stealing food. Mary was kept in a dog kennel in the kitchen, sometimes for up to twenty four hours at a time, naked, zip tied at the wrists. By the end of her life, she was so weak she couldn't stand up, so they duck taped her to a pool ladder. They beat her with speaker wire, guitar wire, fan belts, ripped out of cars, They taste her, They burned her with scalding water. Jr. Her older brother, endured the same treatment two years before her. Between October and November twenty sixteen, he was withdrawn from school, never reported missing, buried in the backyard. And here's the detail you'll never get out of your head. While these children were being tortured to death, Elwyn Crocker Senior was working as a maintenance man at a Walmart in Rincon, Georgia, and during the holidays, Walmart had him dress up as Santa Claus. Santa Claus just over a month after his daughter died. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. Now, the question you're asking, the question I asked when I read this is how does a man who did this end up not facing execution? How does this prosecutor stand up Monday and announce a plea deal that takes death off the table? And the answer is one of the cruelest twists in this whole case. Roy Pratter, the step grandmother's boyfriend, pleaded guilty back in twenty twenty. He had

24:17 cooperated with investigators, spoken to law enforcement for hours, incriminated everybody else in that house, describe what was happening behind those walls. He was the prosecution's key witness against Elwyn Crocker Senior. And in February of this year, twenty twenty six, Roy Prater died. He was awaiting sentencing. He never made it. And here's the legal problem his death created. The Sixth Amendment guarantees a defendant the right to confront the witnesses against him, cross examine them, test their stories. Roy Prater was never cross examined under oath at a trial. He just gave statements to police, which means, with him dead, none of his testimony is admissible against Elwyn Crocker Senior.

24:59 The whole bind of the case against the father gone. So the prosecutor, Robert Busby, had to make a call. Either go to trial with a weekened case and risk losing on the death eligible counts, or take life without parole, lock him up forever and walk away. He took the deal, and then he stood up at a press conference and told reporters, and I'm quoting him here, it's a relief that it's over, but it certainly mixed feelings. I was very driven to get the maximum sentence in this case, and it was disappointing that it ended up being life instead. That is what accountability looks like when the system runs out of moves. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. The prosecutor isn't allowed to invent a sentence that fits. He has to pick from the menu the law gave him, and the menu didn't have what these kids deserved on it.

25:50 Here's what makes it worse. The system had warnings going back over a decade. In twenty twelve, six years before Mary and Jr's bodies were found, the Georgia Division of Family and Children's Services investigated the Crocker family for abusing JR. The case was opened, the case was closed. In twenty seventeen, an Effingham County school counselor allegedly received a report from one of Jr's classmates that JR. Was being abused at home. According to a civil lawsuit, the councilor never notified law enforcement. Jr. Was already dead by then, he had been dead for a year, but Mary was still alive. Mary could have been saved. Nobody made the call. There is one more layer that I want to tell you because it matters for context, but I am not going to dwell on it.

26:42 Elwin Crocker Senior is, according to family members and reporting by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, distantly related to Donald p Wee. Gaskins, one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He's also, according to the same reporting, a survivor of severe childhood abuse himself. None of which is an excuse, none of it. There are millions of abused kids in this country who don't grow up to put their own children in dog crates. But it is a thread, and it is part of why Jr. And Mary Crocker should have been on a list of children We were watching and they weren't. So here is where we land. Five people charged, Mark Wright eighty years, Kim Wright life without parole, Candice Crocker life without parole, Roy Prater died awaiting sentencing.

27:31 Elwyn Crocker Senior life without parole, life without parole plus forty years. Nobody is getting executed for what happened to Jr. And Mary Crocker. The case is closed, and somewhere on a property in Guide in Georgia, two kids are buried. J R. Crocker, Mary Crocker. Remember them, three death penalty cases tonight, three different outcomes converging on roughly the same place. Somebody locked up forever for the rest of their natural life Tanner. Horner's jury still has to decide whether he gets the needle or the cell. Isaiah Chance and his three co defendants in Tampa are at the start of their road. And Elwyn Crocker Senior is already done, already in for life, already ushered off stage. And what I want you to leave with tonight is this capital cases are not really about the perpetrators. The mitigation testimony in Texas, the gang, theatrics in Florida, the plea calculation in Georgia.

28:35 All of it is about the system trying to figure out what to do with people who have already done the worst thing you can do. The kids are already gone, Athena, Jay r. Mary, the bystanders in Tampa who got shot in their hotel rooms. None of this is going to bring any of them back. What it can do, what these cases can do, when prosecutors and detectives and jurors do their jobs, is keep the people who did this from doing it again. That's the floor. That is what justice is in case is this awful? Not equivalents, not balanced, just stopping the next one. And sometimes, like in Effingham County, Georgia on Monday, even that is harder than it should be.

29:16 Athena Strand j R. Crocker, Mary Crocker, Charles Jones, the bystanders at the Holiday Inn, remember them. We'll have new updates from Fort Worth and Tampa in the days ahead, and we'll be here to cover them. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime Injustice. Do Better. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media. The stories covered in this episode are drawn from publicly available reporting, court records, live streams, tabloids, and other Internet sources. Some details may be unverified, contested, or change as cases develop. This show is for entertainment and informational purposes only. It is not legal advice, not a substance for primary court records, and may contain errors. Coverage of the Athena Strand trial and the Julio Fulio murder trial reflects testimony as reported through day twelve and day three, respectively, and remains subject to update.

30:16 Coverage of the Crocker case relies on local reporting and Court TV's Monday news conference summary. Some background details have not been independently verified. Names and pronunciations have been confirmed where possible. Corrections welcome via the show feedback channel