Murder on Birchleaf Drive

by Steven B Epstein

  Collins showed his witness—and the jury—photos of Michelle, Jason, and Cassidy the day they came back from the hospital, of their life together as a family, and of her son and daughter-in-law at the Biltmore House in Asheville and in Puerto Rico.

  Pat told jurors she and Jason had arranged a trip to Puerto Rico with Cassidy after Michelle died. “When we were hiking up into the rain forest, Jason told her that this is the place that her mother loved to go.”

  Collins asked her to describe the sort of father Jason was to Cassidy. She lavished praised on her son, proudly declaring, “Cassidy was first in his life.”

  She told the jury Jason took his daughter to and from preschool, attended her programs there, and would teach her how to eat new foods, including edamame, which he told Cassidy was one of Michelle’s favorites.

  Pat shared with jurors how Jason played games with Cassidy to get her to eat fruit. “He would say, ‘Now I’ve got seven blackberries,’ and he would have them lying on his plate and he would glance off and Cassidy would sneak a blackberry and put it in her mouth. And he’s like, ‘What happened? I’ve only got six blackberries.’”

  Collins asked Pat to describe how her son reacted after finding out Michelle was pregnant with Rylan. She responded he was very enthusiastic “because he wanted four to six children.” He was even more excited, she said, “when he found out they were going to have a little boy” to carry on the Young name.

  The former schoolteacher was next asked how she learned of Michelle’s death. She recounted receiving a call from Michelle’s mother at about 2:00 p.m. on November 3. “She was crying, and she said, ‘My Michelle. My Michelle is dead.’”

  Linda told her Meredith explained there was blood everywhere. “I immediately thought, had Michelle had a miscarriage?” Pat testified. “Because I have had miscarriages and I know that there can be a lot of bleeding involved when you have miscarriages.”

  She told the jury she and Gerald decided not to call Jason, because it would have been dangerous for him to learn the news while driving. Instead, they waited until he got to their house. In the meantime, she called her son’s home number and was able to speak to Meredith. “And she told me that, you know, there was blood everywhere. She told me that Michelle had a pillow between her legs and I thought, ‘Oh, then maybe she was trying to staunch the blood. Maybe she did have a miscarriage.’”

  Pat described for jurors Jason’s arrival at her home that afternoon. Their dog, Gypsy, ran out to greet him at his car. Jason crouched down to pet her.

  But when he walked up to Pat and Gerald, he sensed something was amiss. “He said, ‘What’s wrong Mom?’”

  Gerald delivered the news, bluntly. “Michelle is dead,” he said. “And Jason just went pale,” she explained, “just went white and just went down to the ground, you know, just sank to the ground.”

  “‘That can’t be right,’” she recalled her son repeating.

  Pat thought he was going into shock, telling the jury he was going from hot to cold, and sobbing.

  At about 3:15 p.m. that afternoon, Jason placed a call to Meredith, she said. Pat recalled hearing him say, “Homicide, no, no, no.” And also saying, “I not only lost my wife, but I’ve lost my son.”

  Pat recalled sitting beside her son on a couch at Meredith’s home later that evening. She overheard Jason on the phone talking with someone from the Sheriff’s Office. “I will talk to you when my attorney is present,” she overheard him saying.

  He then handed the phone to her, exasperated, saying, “Mom, they wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “I took the phone,” Pat testified, “and I said, ‘My son has repeatedly told you that he will speak with you when his attorney is present. Have a good evening. Goodbye.’ And I hung up the phone.”

  Collins asked what she remembered about Michelle’s visitation and funeral. At the funeral, Pat recounted, “We were asked to come up, I guess for that last viewing.” The whole family went up together so Jason wouldn’t be alone at the casket. “And we sort of surrounded him,” she told jurors.

  “And what did he do?” the Public Defender asked.

  “He touched Michelle’s hand and then he reached over and he just rubbed his hand on that little mound that was that little baby and I felt—it was so sad.”

  “Was this his last moment with her?”

  “Yes, as far as I know that was.” As his mother answered these questions, Jason buried his head in his hands at the defense counsel table, sobbing. Pat, on the other hand, remained stoic and unemotional.

  While the family said their goodbyes to Michelle, news crews hungry for footage for their broadcasts waited outside. Pat recalled camera crews in the bushes beside their motel. Collins asked her if the swirl of media attention raised concerns for Jason.

  “He didn’t want Cassidy exposed to the media,” she responded. “He didn’t want her picture plastered everywhere. He didn’t, you know, he didn’t feel like that girl needed to go through that.” That was why Jason had Heather and Joe take Cassidy back to the mountains immediately following the funeral, she explained—so his daughter wouldn’t be exposed to that atmosphere.

  Collins then shifted his focus to Cassidy’s third birthday party in March 2007. He placed photos of the event in front of Pat and asked her about them. In one of the photos, Jason was flying his daughter around on a “magic carpet.”

  In another, he was pictured behind Cassidy and next to his mother, who was scooping ice cream from a container. Jason was wearing a dark-colored sweater with a thin white stripe across the chest—strikingly similar to the shirt he was wearing when he was spotted behind the front desk of the Hampton Inn the second time.

  Jason’s lawyer asked Pat why Linda and Meredith had been cut off from visiting with Cassidy. She replied that the last time Linda had been at her home, she “became very hysterical, crying, loud.” That behavior, Pat testified, occurred after she and one of her friends confronted Linda with newspaper articles in which Linda had said she hadn’t been permitted to see Cassidy.

  Pat told Linda what she told the newspaper wasn’t true. Linda agreed and offered to correct it. But to Pat’s knowledge, she never did.

  “Jason and I felt that she didn’t need to be—Cassidy did not need to be exposed to all the drama,” Pat explained. “The, you know, hysterical crying, you know, those sorts of things. We had tried, Jason and I had tried so very hard to have a normal life for Cassidy, a happy life and let her be the little three-year-old that she was.”

  As fate would have it, Pat was present when Jason was arrested in December 2009. She told the jury Jason’s Explorer hadn’t been running properly, so she followed him in her car to the small repair shop where he took the SUV. As they were walking back to her car to head home, she testified, officers came out of nowhere and surrounded her son. They handcuffed Jason and quickly put him in a patrol car.

  “I spoke to a couple of the officers,” Pat recounted, “and then I said, ‘Can I hug him? Can I tell him goodbye? Can I hug him?’ And they opened the door and I—he had the cuffs [behind him] so I reached down to hug him.”

  “Is that the last time you ever hugged him?” Collins asked.

  “The last time I ever hugged him,” Pat replied, finally showing a hint of emotion.

  “He’s been in jail ever since?”

  “Yes, he has.”

  Collins ended his direct examination by asking Pat about the testimony she heard from Michelle Money and Carol Anne Sowerby. She testified she knew nothing about Jason’s relationships with either woman.

  “Do you approve of that sort of behavior?” he asked.

  “I do not approve,” she answered.

  “Was he raised better than that?”

  “He was,” Pat replied. “He was raised better than that.”

  Becky Holt handled Pat’s cross-examination. She asked Jason’s mother about the restrictions placed on Linda and Meredith during their visits with Cassidy.

  “You’ve heard descri
bed by the Fishers that they weren’t able to be alone with Cassidy?” Holt asked.

  “Yes,” Pat responded.

  “And was that your decision or was that the defendant’s decision?”

  “It was probably a combined decision,” Pat responded.

  “And so you had friends and family members that would watch them such that they couldn’t even go into the bathroom and be alone?”

  “Yes,” Pat agreed.

  After Holt was done, Collins asked Pat why she and Jason didn’t want Linda and Meredith to be alone with Cassidy.

  Pat said, “By now we had seen how angry Linda was and accusing Jason, and that sort of thing. We had read those things and we did not know what, how they might—what they might say to Cassidy, what they might put into Cassidy’s mind. Also, I believed that they might take Cassidy—take Cassidy away.”

  At that point, Judge Stephens interjected. “You mean you believed they might, if they weren’t supervised, they might put her in the car and just leave with her? Is that what you mean?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Pat told the judge.

  • • • • •

  Jason’s stepfather, Gerald McIntyre, was the next witness for the defense. He testified he and Pat were devastated by the news of Michelle’s death—especially considering she was pregnant with their grandson. “Jason was excited over it. And it just took something out of us. Even this breath I’m taking now, I haven’t got over it because part of him died that day,” he told jurors.

  McIntyre recounted how when he shared the news with his stepson, “he just about went to the ground. If I hadn’t have caught him, he would have went plum on the ground.”

  Though Holt’s cross-examination wasn’t long, she did elicit a couple of noteworthy admissions. When Sheriff’s officers came to Brevard in February 2008 to execute their search warrant, McIntyre acknowledged, he called Jason just before the officers arrived at the park to meet with him.

  “And you told him … to keep his mouth shut?” Holt asked.

  “I told him not to speak of the situation unless he had representation with him,” McIntyre told the Assistant DA.

  “Do you remember stating several times that you would stick with your family to the death?” she probed.

  “That’s what I meant. It’s what I said,” McIntyre agreed.

  Jason’s younger sister Heather testified next. She described Jason’s relationship with Michelle during their courting days as “playful. You know, they flirted a lot and were sweet to each other. It was kind of nice because Jason teased me often, but now that Michelle was part of his life, she got that teasing as well, so it wasn’t as much on me.”

  Heather recalled the scene at Meredith’s home the evening of Michelle’s death. “It was just very quiet, very sad,” she told the jury. “Jason and Meredith embraced. And they stood there and cried quietly with one another.”

  When she and her husband Joe went outside to retrieve their luggage, as Joe was opening the trunk of Jason’s Explorer and placing his hand on a suitcase, Heather recounted, “The police cars came in quickly and stopped. And the officers got out and they told Joe to put the luggage back and that they had a search warrant for the vehicle and that we were not to take anything out of the car.”

  She testified she “was just in disbelief. And the police officer asked us who we were. And I said, ‘I’m Jason Young’s younger sister.’ … And he said, ‘Where is your brother now?’ I said, ‘He’s inside with his daughter.’ He said, ‘Is there any way he can leave or escape from the back?’ I said, ‘He’s with his daughter.’ And I couldn’t believe he was asking me that question.”

  • • • • •

  Jason’s friends and former N.C. State classmates Brian Ambrose, Josh Dalton, and Demetrius Barrett were also called as defense witnesses. Ambrose and his wife and children, who lived near Charlotte, had planned to travel to Raleigh to attend the Wolfpack football game with Jason and Michelle on Saturday, November 4, 2006. Earlier that week, Ambrose had discussed with Jason the possibility of spending that Friday evening at the Youngs’ Birchleaf Drive home.

  He testified he informed Jason during a phone conversation that Friday morning he had decided instead of coming to their home that night, his family was going to spend the evening at his wife’s parents’ home in Sanford.

  They planned to meet up with Jason and Michelle at their home the next morning before heading to the stadium to tailgate.

  During their conversation, Ambrose testified, Jason told him that because Ambrose’s family wasn’t going to spend the night at his house, he was going to head to his mother’s home in Brevard, spend the night with her, and then meet up with them the next morning.

  During cross-examination, Saacks asked Jason’s friend if he knew of anything unusual Jason would sometimes do at parties. Klinkosum objected to the question’s relevance, but Judge Stephens overruled the objection.

  Ambrose responded, “I mean, it was pretty common knowledge that Jason, you know, was known to get naked and I guess, do genitalia tricks, I guess is the way I’ll put it. You know, I’d say he—he was always the life of the party and he would do whatever it took, you know, to get the attention and to make sure people were laughing.”

  Josh Dalton testified detectives were at his house the afternoon of the murder, subjecting him to “very direct questioning” about Jason and his relationship with Michelle. He told the jury he could tell very quickly they considered Jason a suspect. He and Ryan Schaad discussed the matter and agreed Jason needed to get a lawyer. Ryan, he testified, called Jason to deliver that message.

  Dalton also testified that, at the visitation at the funeral home, Jason went off to the bathroom by himself. When Dalton went to check on his friend, “he seemed to be pretty upset, like he had just either thrown up—pretty white, you know, pretty pale.”

  During cross-examination, Holt asked Dalton to describe Jason’s relationship with Michelle. He responded, “It could be volatile,” and they had “very heated arguments,” which they weren’t afraid to have in public. Their arguments, he testified, “ran the gamut.” He also told the jury most of Jason’s friends didn’t believe they would have gotten married had it not been for Michelle’s pregnancy.

  Dalton also acknowledged Jason had confided in him about his trip to Florida that October to see Michelle Money. “He basically told me that he thought he was in love with her,” he testified. Dalton added Jason had also mentioned Money hoped to have another child and they “had joked wouldn’t it be funny—because she was trying to get pregnant again—if it was his kid.”

  Holt also questioned Jason’s friend about the weekend of Ryan’s and Shelly’s wedding. Dalton testified he and his wife Julie, together with Jason and Michelle, were walking across the street from the hotel prior to the rehearsal dinner. “And on the way over, Jason just kept berating her and berating her,” Dalton told jurors, about why she wouldn’t admit that she had erased a message on their answering machine from Dalton’s wife Julie. Both he and Julie told Jason to let it go. “He wouldn’t stop and so Michelle turned around and went, ‘Fine. I’ll go back to the hotel.’”

  The Assistant DA’s final set of questions was on the topic of divorce. She asked the witness if he and Jason ever discussed that subject. Dalton responded that Jason “had made a statement at one time that he was afraid that if he ever got a divorce, Michelle would take Cassidy and move back to New York.” Further, he said Jason didn’t know if he would ever get to see Cassidy again.

  Demetrius Barrett testified he was Jason’s supervisor at University Towers and the two remained friends after college. He recalled calling Jason the evening of November 2 to discuss a home warranty. Though Jason didn’t answer his phone, he called back just a few minutes later.

  Barrett stated that Jason had just arrived at his hotel room in Virginia and that he could hear the Thursday night football game in the background as they spoke. Jason told him he was going to spend the following night at his pare
nts’ home, but would be back on Saturday morning to tailgate before the football game. They spoke for about five minutes. Barrett didn’t recall anything unusual about the call.

  • • • • •

  The defense also called Terry Tiller and Cindy Beaver as witnesses. Tiller testified the Youngs’ home was “lit up” and “brighter than ever” when she passed by it on her New York Times delivery route between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m. on November 3. It “jumped out” at her because it was normally so dark. She thought there must have been some kind of party going on. Tiller also noticed a light-colored SUV parked in front of the house and a blue minivan parked across the street.

  Cindy Beaver was the ninth and final witness to testify on June 21. She testified she had a vivid recollection of driving by 5108 Birchleaf Drive on her way to work at about 5:30 a.m. that morning. Not only were the lights on inside and outside the house, she recalled a “soccer mom” type vehicle coming down the driveway in her direction.

  “And the thing I remember so vividly,” she told the jury, “was that I had my bright lights on—I had a lower car at the time and the bright lights were pretty bright. And the bright lights hit the automobile and I’m first concerned, I’ve just blinded somebody at 5:15, 5:20 in the morning. And there were two people in the car. And since the car was coming out of the driveway, you know, my lights hit them first, right in the face, basically.”

  Beaver testified her lights hit the passenger’s face, causing that person to turn toward the driver. She then saw the passenger talking to the driver and noticed that the driver was a Caucasian man whose hands were gripping the steering wheel. She assumed the passenger was a woman because she had thick, bushy hair.