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Crime House 24/7
He Shot His Roommate Over Doughnuts, Then Dragged the Body Down Seven Flights of Stairs
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Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. Real quick, before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show from Crime House that I know you'll love. America's Most Infamous Crimes. Hosted by Katie Ring. Each week, Katie takes on one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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This is Crime House.
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Good morning everyone. We have multiple breaking true crime cases this morning that you need to know about. And we're starting with the biggest one. What started as an argument over donuts allegedly ended with a man shot dead in his dorm room. And the testimony this week about what came next is something you won't forget. This is crime house 24 7, your non stop source for the biggest crime cases developing right now. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Vanessa Richardson and we have quite a lineup for you today. Here's what you need to know.
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On April 8th, testimony continued in the trial of 20 year old Randall Smith in Mississippi, with witnesses on the stand describing in detail what they saw inside a Jackson State University dormitory in the early morning hours of December 2, 2022. Smith, a new Orleans native, is accused of shooting and killing his roommate, 22 year old Flynn Brown, a student from New Jersey. According to investigators, the dispute that set everything in motion was over donuts. At a preliminary hearing back in December 2022, Smith told the court that Brown had taken a box of donuts out of his hands and that the confrontation escalated from there. Smith claimed Brown began choking him and that he grabbed a gun in self defense. But what the prosecution alleges happened next tells a very different story. According to court records, investigators say Smith shot Brown once in the head inside their shared dorm room on the seventh floor of Dixon Hall. Prosecutors contend this was no act of self def. An autopsy determined Brown was shot from over two feet away in the back of the head. After the shooting, Smith allegedly poured bleach on the floor to clean up the Blood then dragged Brown's body down all seven flights of stairs before placing it in the truck of Brown's own Dodge Challenger parked outside the building. Brown's body was discovered inside that vehicle on the morning of December 2, 2022. Smith was taken into custody that same day. A Hines county grand jury indicted him on a first degree murder charge in May 2023 and now in 2026. Jury selection in the trial began April 6 and continued through April 7, when prosecutors began calling their first witnesses to the stand. Eric Stanton, who served as operations captain at Jackson State at the time, said a security officer reported that a suit made of Smith and Brown had woken up that morning, spotted blood in the dorm, and had seen someone dragging a large item from the room. When Stanton entered Dixon hall, he said he observed bloody drag marks in the lobby before taking the elevator to the suite on the seventh floor. Inside, he testified, there was an overwhelming smell of bleach and visible blood on a bathroom sink. Stanton knocked on Smith and Brown's room door. When Smith answered, the odors and blood became even more evident. Stanton testified he asked Smith directly, quote, why is there blood everywhere and why does the area smell like bleach? End quote. Smith told him that he and his roommate had been in a physical altercation and that Brown had left. Afterward, Stanton said he asked for consent to search the room, describing Smith as visibly nervous and jittery. Before the formal search began, as Stanton detained Smith in another part of the suite, Smith made an unprompted statement. He said, quote, can I tell you a story? End quote. Stanton said yes. Smith then told him his roommate had been picking on him for a long time, that this was their second physical altercation and that Brown had hold a weapon on him, so he took it and used it. When asked again about Brown's whereabouts, Smith allegedly owned up to placing Brown in the Dodge Challenger. He even said he'd put the car keys in his closet. And when investigators checked, the keys were exactly where he said. Smith also directed them, to a shoe box in the same closet where they found a black 9 millimeter Glock 17 with an extended magazine and one cartridge removed from the chamber. On April 8, the jury also heard from Amari Ward, one of Smith and Brown's suitemates. Ward testified that Brown had previously accused Smith of stealing his laptop and that the two had gotten into a physical fight roughly two months before the killing. However, he also told jurors that the day before Brown was killed, the two seemed perfectly fine, even playful with each other. On the morning of the shooting. Ward said he heard loud music coming from their room. When he walked over to check, he found blood everywhere. He then witnessed Smith doing something that immediately struck him as wrong. In his own words, he said, quote, the first place I noticed it was on the floor and there was a gray tote and it looked like there was a pile of blood on the tote as well. I saw the Challenger parked outside, I heard the dragging noises and I saw him tugging a black box with a sheet all over it, end quote. Prosecutors have also noted in court filings that in the weeks before the killing, Smith allegedly made it known he was going to kill Brown and even asked a fellow student if he could borrow a gun. The defense, led by attorney Kevin Dale Camp, maintains throughout all of this that Smith acted in self defense and that argument will be tested as testimony continues. Flynn Brown was an only child, a former high school football standout from New Jersey who had earned a roster spot on the Jackson State football team then coached by Deion Sanders, and was working toward his future when his life was cut short. His mother told the Clarion Ledger that losing him changed her life. Fore now we go to North Carolina where a major development is halting proceedings in one of the most closely watched murder cases in the country. On April 7, court documents made public in Charlotte, North Carolina revealed a significant development in the murder case against 34 year old De Carlos Brown Jr. The man accused of fatally stabbing 23 year old Ukraine refugee Irina Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train in August 2025. A state psychiatric facility, Central Regional Hospital, evaluated Brown and determined in a report dated December 29, 2025 that he is incapable to proceed in his state murder case, meaning he cannot currently participate meaningfully in his own defense. Brown's public defender, Daniel Roberts, filed a motion in Mecklenburg county superior court on April 7 asking the court to delay a Rule 24 hearing. The proceeding used in capital eligible cases to determine whether the death penalty will be sought for 180 days. That hearing had been scheduled for April 30. A judge still has to formally accept the evaluation's findings, but the case is now suspended unless and until Brown's competency is restored. Before getting into the legal developments, it's important to understand who Arina Zyrutska was and what happened to her. Zyrutska fled war torn Ukraine with her mother, sister and brother to escape the Russian invasion and eventually settled in the Charlotte area. She enrolled in community college classes to improve her English, found work at a pizzeria in Charlotte's lower South End and was building a life for herself. On the evening of August 22, 2025, she finished her shift and boarded the Cats Links Blue Line, heading home to the North Davidson neighborhood where she lived with her boyfriend. She never made it home. Surveillance footage that has since gone viral captured what happened next. Brown, who was already seated on the train, had spent hours riding the Blue Line that day. Four minutes after Zarutska sat down in front of him, Brown pulled a pocket knife from his hoodie and stabbed her three times from behind, including at least once in the neck. She was pronounced dead at the scene and Brown was later arrested at the scene. Before August 22, 2025, Brown had 14 prior court cases in Mecklenburg county dating back to 2007. He was convicted of armed robbery in 2015and served time in state prison before his release in September 2020. His most recent arrest before the stabbing was in January 2025, when he called 911 from outside a Charlotte hospital, claiming that a man made material had been placed inside his body and was controlling his movements. When officers responded and told him it was a medical matter they couldn't investigate, Brown called 911 a second time while they were still on scene asking for more officers. He was arrested and charged with misuse of the 911 system, then released without bail. Brown faces charges on two separate tracks. A Mecklenburg county grand jury indicted him on first degree murder charges in September 2025. A federal grand jury then separately indicted him in October 2025 on charges of committing violence against a mass transportation system resulting in death, a federal charge that carries special findings making him eligible for the death penalty. He remains in federal custody on those charges, which his defense attorney argues further complicates the timeline of any state competency hearing. For Zarutska's family, the path to any resolution just got longer and less certain. Coming up, another North Carolina case where a Marine veteran's road to trial has also come to a sudden stop.
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On April 8, a judge in Brunswick County, N.C. ordered that Nigel Max Edge, the 41 year old Marine veteran charged with three counts of first degree murder in a mass shooting in Southport last fall, be transferred to Cherry Hospital, a state psychiatric facility in Goldsboro, for treatment. The ruling puts the entire criminal case on hold indefinitely. The shooting happened on September 27, 2025. Authorities allege Edge piloted a small motorboat up to the American Fish Company, a dockside cocktail bar in the waterfront town of Southport. Ed opened fire with a short barreled semiautomatic rifle. Three people were killed and several others were injured. Edge has been charged with three counts of first degree murder along with additional charges stemming from the attack. His case was scheduled to come before Brunswick county superior court on April 7 for a hearing at which District Attorney David was expected to announce whether his office intended to seek the death penalty. But that hearing was set aside entirely after questions about Edge's mental competency arose. DA David said in a news release that the defense presented evaluations from two independent mental health experts concluding that Edge lacks the capacity to proceed to trial. His office then requested a third independent evaluation from a state forensic examiner. All three evaluations reached the same conclusion. The state's expert also found that Edge's competency may be restored through appropriate treatment, which means the case could eventually resume. There is important context behind those mental health findings. Edge served with an elite sniper unit in Iraq where he was shot four times in combat, including once in the head. Friends and families say he's been diagnosed with post Traumatic stress disorder and that he still has a bullet lodged in his brain to this day. DA David made clear that the state's option to seek the death penalty has not been taken off the table, saying it could still be pursued should the facts and law warrant it once Edge's capacity is restored. For the families of the three people killed in Southport, there's no clear timeline for when they will see this case move forward. For now, it remains in limbo. From coastal North Carolina, we head to Cincinnati, where a years long murder case recently ended with a last minute twist in court. On April 8, a murder case out of Cincinnati that has been winding through the courts for nearly four years came to a resolution, one that few saw coming. 20 year old DeShawn Jones pleaded guilty in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court to an amended charge of attempted murder in connection with the May 2022 shooting death of 15 year old Jerome E. Lipscomb III in Cincinnati's West End neighborhood. The original charge against Jones was first degree murder. At the request of prosecutors, Judge Christopher McDowell dismissed the remaining charges against Jones, a second murder count, four counts of felonious assault and a concealed weapons charge. Jones was sentenced to nine to 13 and a half years in prison with credit for the roughly 1,337 days, nearly four years he's already served behind bars. Jones was only 16 years old when he was arrested in August 2022. His case was bound over from juvenile court in December 2022, and he has been in custody at the Hamilton County Jail ever since. Throughout that time, Jones maintained that he was not the one who pulled the trigger. His attorney, Brandon Fox, said he believed his client because the evidence aligned with what Jones was telling him. The turning point came in two parts. Prosecutors were required to hand over a witness statement to the defense, and separately, Fox's team tracked down an additional eyewitness whose identity has not been made public, who told investigators that Jones was not the shooter. A judge determined that eyewitness to be credible and their testimony necessary for a just outcome, which ultimately paved the way for the plea deal. Jerome Lipscomb III's mother also addressed the court on April 8, telling the room that May 29, 2022, was the day her darkest fear became her reality, the day she lost her only son and her best friend. She ended by saying that two lives were destroyed that day. Jones will serve his sentence with credit for the nearly four years he's already spent behind bars. For the Lipscomb family, no courtroom outcome brings Jerome back. But on Wednesday, his mother made sure his name was not forgotten. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa Richardson. I wanted to take a brief moment to tell you about another show from Crime House that I know you'll love, America's Most Infamous Crimes, hosted by Katie Ring. Each week, Katie takes on a notorious crime, whether unfolding now or etched into American history, revealing not just what happened, but but how it forever changed our society. Serial killers who terrorized cities, unsolved mysteries that keep detectives up at night, and investigations that change the way we think about justice. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday, from the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. These are the stories behind the headlines. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes Tuesday through Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts. Lastly, let me tell you about what else is happening at Crime House today. Conspiracy theories, Cults and Crimes is examining the story of Bob Lazar, the man who came forward in 1989 claiming he had worked at a classified facility near Area 51 on a program to reverse engineer propulsion systems from craft that did not originate on Earth. His claims have been disputed, investigated, partially corroborated, and never definitively resolved. 35 years later, people are still arguing about him. What's easy to forget is that Lazar didn't emerge from nowhere. He came forward in the middle of a long, largely hidden history of government interest in unidentified aerial phenomena Programs with classified budgets, internal disputes, and employees who sometimes decided that what they had seen was too important to stay quiet about. Before you head over to conspiracy theories, cults and crimes for the full story, here are five government UFO programs that someone, at some point, wasn't supposed to tell you about. Number one, Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was the United States Air Force's official program for investigating reports of unidentified flying objects. It ran from 1952 to 1969, collected over 12,000 reported sightings, and officially concluded that the vast majority had conventional explanations. Weather phenomena, aircraft, astronomical events, or simple misidentification. Of the total cases, 701 were officially classified as unknown, meaning investigators could not identify a conventional explanation even after review. The program was shuttered in 1969 following the Condon Report, an independent scientific review commissioned by the Air Air force that concluded UFOs posed no threat to national security and warranted no further investigation. What emerged in the years that followed, through declassified documents, interviews with former analysts, and the accounts of people who had worked on the program, was a more complicated picture. Several former Blue Book personnel said publicly that the program had operated under an institutional directive to explain cases rather than investigate them, and that reports involving credible witnesses, multiple observers, or radar confirmation were handled differently than the public record suggested. Captain Edward Ruppelt, who headed the program in its early years, later wrote a book in which he described significant internal pressure to produce conventional explanations regardless of what the evidence showed. The Condon report itself was later scrutinized by scientists who noted that its conclusions did not always match its own data. That a meaningful number of cases within the report remained genuinely unexplained even by the committee's own analysis. Yet the summary dismissed the phenomenon entirely. Project Blue Book remains the most extensive official UFO investigation in American history. Whether it was a genuine inquiry or an elaborate institutional exercise in reassurance is a question its own records have never fully settled. Number two, the Roswell retrieval. In July 1947, something crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. The initial press release from Roswell Army Airfield announced the recovery recovery of a flying disc. Within 24 hours, that statement was walked back and the material was reclassified as a weather balloon. The story was officially over. It didn't stay over. What the Roswell incident introduced into the public record, and what subsequent decades of declassification, testimony and investigation have never fully resolved, was the question of what program, if any, was activated in the immediate aftermath of the recovery. Witnesses who worked at the base in 1946, seven, including military personnel, civilian contractors, and local residents, described a rapid and unusually intense response. Convoys of vehicles, materials transported under armed guard, a level of operational security that seemed disproportionate to a weather balloon. Glenn Dennis, a mortician in Roswell who had contact with the base, claimed he received calls from the base mortuary officer asking about the availability of child sized, hermetically sealed caskets and inquiring about preservation methods for bodies that had been exposed to the elements. He also claimed to have spoken with a nurse stationed at the base who described being present during the examination of non human remains before she was abruptly transferred and became unreachable. The Air Force has offered multiple explanations for the Roswell incident over the decades, most recently attributing witness descriptions of non human bodies to misidentified crash test dummies, a program that did not begin until 1953, six years after the incident. The timeline discrepancy has never been formally addressed. Whatever was recovered near Roswell in 1947 and whatever program processed it, the official record contains enough internal contradiction to ensure the question has never fully closed. Number 3s4 and the reverse engineering program Bob Lazar's central claim, made public in a 1989 television interview in Las Vegas, was specific and detailed, detailed in ways that distinguished it from most UFO testimony of the era. He described not a sighting but a program, a compartmentalized research project housed at a facility called S4, located south of the Main Area 51 complex at Groom Lake, Nevada. Built into the side of a mountain with hangar doors angled to match the slope of the terrain. The program Lazar described was focused on back engineering the propulsion systems of craft that had been acquired through means he said he was not clear to know. He described nine craft of varying designs housed at the facility. The propulsion systems he worked on, he said, operated on a gravity wave principle using an element he identified as element 115, a substance that did not appear on the periodic table at the time of his interview. Element 115, moscovium, was synthesized by scientists in 2003 and was officially added to the periodic table in 2016. The program Lazar described has never been officially confirmed his employment records at Los Alamos National Laboratory were initially denied before a phone directory entry was discovered confirming his presence there. The facility he described has never been publicly acknowledged. And yet the specific technical nature of his claims, Made in 1989, years before the Internet made cross referencing easy, has kept his account in serious circulation in a way that that vague UFO testimony rarely achieves. Whether S4 exists, whether the program he described exists, and whether the craft he described are sitting in a hangar somewhere in the Nevada desert remain officially unanswered questions. Number four a tip in 2017, the New York Times reported the existence of a classified Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat identification program, or AATIP. The program had operated from 2007 to 2012 with a budget of approximately $22 million, funded through a Defense Department black money appropriation secured in part through the efforts of Nevada Senator Harry Reid. Its stated purpose was to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena that posed potential national security implications. The program's existence was not publicly known during its operational period. When it was reported, the Pentagon initially confirmed only its existence and dates, declining to elaborate on its findings or nature of the craft it had investigated. What accompanied the Times report and what made it land differently than previous UFO disclosures was video. Three declassified clips of footage taken by US Navy pilots showed objects moving in ways that appeared to defy conventional aerodynamic explanation. No visible propulsion, no exhaust, sudden acceleration, and the ability to transition between air and water. The footage had been captured during training exercises. The pilots who filmed it had filed official reports. Those reports had gone somewhere into a program that the public wasn't supposed to know about, until a former program director decided to go public with what he had seen. The Pentagon subsequently confirmed the authenticity of all three videos. It has not confirmed what the objects in them are. Number five UAP task force and the congressional testimony in 2020, the Pentagon officially established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, marking the first time in decades that the US Government had created a formal acknowledged structure for investigating UFO reports. The following year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment covering 144 UAP incidents reported by U.S. military personnel between 2004 2021. Of those 144 incidents, investigators were able to identify a conventional explanation for exactly one. The remaining 143 remained unexplained. In 2023, a former intelligence official named David Grush testified before the House Oversight Committee under oath, stating that the United States government was in possession of non human craft and biological material of non human origin and that a mult decade program of concealment had been maintained across administrations. He described a retrieval and reverse engineering program operating outside of normal congressional oversight channels, funded through mechanisms designed to avoid scrutiny. He said he'd been denied access to relevant programs despite having the appropriate clearances, and that colleagues who had attempted to come forward had faced retaliation. Grush's testimony was notable not just for its content but for its setting. This was not a late night radio interview or a self published book. It was a sworn testimony before the United States Congress delivered by a person with a documented security clearance and a career in intelligence. Other witnesses at the same hearing, including active and retired military pilots, described encounters with craft exhibiting capabilities that had no conventional explanation. The Department of Defense has not confirmed Grusch's specific claims. It has also not formally denied them. The program he described, if it exists, would be the most significant covert operation in the history of the United States government. Whether it exists is at this moment still officially an open question. For the full story behind Bob Lazar and the program he says he worked on, head over to our Crime House feed for the latest episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. You've been listening to crime house 247 bringing you breaking crime news. I'm Vanessa Richardson. We'll be back Monday morning with more developing stories. Stay safe and thanks for listening.
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Thanks for listening to today's episode. Not sure what to listen to next. Next, check out America's Most Infamous Crimes hosted by Katie Ring. From serial killers to unsolved mysteries and game changing investigations, each week Katie takes on a notorious criminal case in American history. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes now. Wherever you listen to podcasts.