Iesha Cleveland was one of my favorite members of the Cleveland family. About four years older than Jorell, she had style and panache, apt to change hairstyles or fly off to Vegas to party with girlfriends at a moment’s notice. But she was also grounded, and something of the Cleveland matriarch. The eldest of Jorell’s four living sisters, she was the family glue, planning get-togethers, organizing remembrances of the three deceased siblings (Chaz, Joseph Jr., and Jorell), and making herself available to look after her nieces and nephews. Like Jorell, Iesha was a hard worker, always holding a job. She mopped up bathrooms, cleaned airplanes at St. Louis Lambert airport, or worked the drive-thru dispensing fried chicken. She shared an apartment with her boyfriend, Mike Fuller, and their baby near the Loop. Various members of the family stayed with them at different points.
Following Jorell’s death I also became close with Mike. Though he was about six years older than Jorell, the two had been best friends. Before Mike and his clan moved to the Loop, they lived in the Cleveland house, staying in a room just down the hall from Jorell. Mike and Jorell spent a lot of time together, playing zombie video games, smoking weed, and just rolling around the neighborhood.
When I had questions about Jorell’s secret life—the stuff he kept from me—people often referred me to Mike, who knew him better than almost anyone.
Mike was happy to chat. Verbose and outgoing, he was the opposite of Jorell, who tended to be inward and quiet. Mike was always trying to do right. He earned his Occupational Safety and Health Administration license and for a stint drove a forklift at the Schnucks warehouse in Kinloch. Sometimes he stayed home full time to care for his daughter.
I’d begun speaking with Mike at Jorell’s funeral repast. He is short with bright hazel eyes, and has a way of quickly drawing you into his confidence. He talked to me like we were longtime friends.
“I heard a lot about you from Jorell,” he said. “I feel like I already know you.”
He was clearly suffering. He got Jorell’s name tattooed on his left arm in the weeks following Jorell’s death, with a crown above it. “Me and Iesha never got married but me and Jorell still called each other brothers,” he tearfully reminisced one time, adding that he’d been having dreams about him. “Him straight talking to me. I loved him.”
Mike added that I too had been a very special person in Jorell’s life. “You don’t know how much influence you had, Ben,” he said. “He used to watch the porch for you, when you came to pick him up on the weekends. Your opinion of him mattered.”
This surprised me to hear. I thought Jorell considered me a nag, in his later years, since I was always hounding him about his schoolwork and eating habits. Plus, he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me the truth about the stickier aspects of his life.
“He felt like he had to put on a fake persona for you because he didn’t want to ever let you down,” Mike explained.
His words nearly brought me to tears. I hated the idea that Jorell couldn’t show me who he really was, but Mike’s insight seemed to positively affirm our relationship.
Mike spoke in a thick St. Louis accent. The local grocery store chain Schnucks became “Snooks,” errands were “urrends,” “I don’t care” was “I don’t curr.” He used “scary” to mean “scared,” as in, so-and-so was “too scary” to have killed Jorell.
He spent a lot of time with his identical twin brother Montrel. Both were light-skinned with tufts of chin hair, except that Montrel wore long dreadlocks and packed on a few extra pounds.
They were both charming, but I quickly learned they were complicated people who’d had troubles with the law. In August 2017 they were both arrested and charged with second-degree robbery. Feeling remorseful, neither wanted to discuss the details of their crime; they knew they had made mistakes that could cost them years of their lives, and they were both fighting substance abuse issues simultaneously. Though I don’t have any legal training, I tried to help them navigate a legal system that was historically stacked against African Americans. In late 2018 I began meeting up with them at the St. Louis County Courthouse on days when they had hearings, and sitting in on meetings with their lawyers.
The courthouse is in downtown Clayton, a rare part of that wealthy suburb where the rich and the poor comingle, where people on different sides of the law keep company. On a typical weekday you get down-and-outers, young mothers pushing strollers, quick-walking prosecutors, and eager assistants. Sartorial styles range from long synthetic braids and baseball caps to polished leather shoes and bow ties. The courthouse is a windowless environment lit by dull fluorescents, with the smell of stale marijuana hanging in the air. Some defendants are white, though more are Black, and most of the legal professionals are white.
Attached to the courthouse is the county jail, part of the Buzz Westfall Justice Center, named for the late St. Louis County executive, a doughy white guy who grew up in St. Louis public housing. After Mike and Montrel’s arrests they spent about five months in the jail while their mother put up the deed to their house as collateral to secure their bond. Now, as their cases unfolded, they returned frequently to the courthouse.
The days featured long stretches of boredom while we waited for the wheels of justice to turn, interspersed with chaotic spurts of activity when a lawyer or judge called them to attention. During the periods of downtime we had wide-ranging conversations about Jorell. Mostly I spoke with Mike. I wanted to know everything—good and bad—even if it was sometimes difficult to hear. When it came to Jorell’s case, Mike was something of an amateur investigator himself. He badly wanted to know the shooter’s identity, and he kept his ear to the streets.
As my efforts ramped up he was willing to share his theories, and I was glad to hear them. I needed grassroots help with my investigation, since working official channels had failed. Mike described to me the movers and shakers in the world Jorell inhabited.
I first wanted to know about the man St. Louis County police arrested as a suspect. Though he was never formally charged and they let him go, I figured there must have been some reason they apprehended him in the first place.
Though I’d later learn his name was Chauncey James, at the time I had no information about him. The detectives told Joe Cleveland he was a married man who lived near the Cleveland home in Ferguson. One of my sources told me where she believed he lived, so I scoped out the location and ran the address through databases. But it turned out to be the wrong house.
Mike Fuller, however, had more accurate information about Chauncey James. He didn’t know him, but he knew about Jorell’s interactions with him. To my shock, Mike said Jorell had been involved in violent incidents with both this man and his wife, Marsha James. Mike told me the details one winter morning in early 2019, in the courthouse’s fourth floor waiting area.
The first altercation happened a couple of months before Jorell’s death. It was an ugly incident that occurred at a time when Jorell was behaving particularly recklessly, Mike said. He had stopped listening to reason.
It was a late evening in June or early July 2016. That night Mike and Jorell were in the market for Swisher Sweets cigars; they planned to empty out the tobacco and fill them with weed. To make the purchase, they drove to a convenience store called R&R Mini Mart & Liquor.
Located just across the street from an Imo’s Pizza franchise, R&R was a stand-alone, nondescript bodega selling snacks, cigarettes, and booze. It’s the kind of establishment that dots Ferguson, North County, and low-income neighborhoods all over the country. In November 2017 a man was shot and killed in front of it. Surveillance footage captured the presumed shooter, a woman in a red, white, and blue stocking cap who ambushed the man in his car. In her retreat she dropped the cap, which later tested positive for her DNA.
All was quiet on the night Jorell and Mike arrived. They’d come in Montrel’s car, and brought Mike’s young daughter with them. They purchased their items, and in the parking lot encountered a guy Jorell knew, who was passing through on his bike. He and Jorell embraced; Mike had no idea they knew each other. The guy said he wanted to buy some weed and Jorell said he’d be happy to supply him, back at the Cleveland house. “We’ll give you a ride,” Jorell insisted. “You can throw your bike in the back.” The guy nodded in agreement and Mike popped the trunk.
Just then Marsha James—the wife of the man police would arrest as a suspect in Jorell’s murder—showed up. She was also the older sister of the boy who wanted weed from Jorell. She was African American, in her early thirties.
It’s unclear why she had come. In Mike’s recollection, she was drinking from a plastic cup filled with a purple-colored drink. She stopped when she saw the assembled group. She did not like the idea of her brother getting a ride from Jorell and Mike. Although she didn’t know them personally, she knew them by reputation.
“Don’t get in the car with them,” Marsha told her brother loudly. “They be having guns!” She also derisively noted that they didn’t have Mike’s daughter in a proper car seat.
Jorell did not take kindly to this. He began to get heated. “Calm down,” Mike said to him quietly. But it was no use. Jorell told her to shut up, and he and Marsha began to argue. She gave as good as she got. She was “talking crazy,” Mike said. “She was getting all in his face.”
As her argument with Jorell escalated and reached a breaking point, she threw the purple beverage from her cup in his face, Mike recalled. Jorell responded by punching her in the mouth.
“I couldn’t believe he would hit a woman that hard,” Mike told me.
My eyes bulged. I couldn’t believe it either.
Marsha’s brother tried to intercede. “That’s my sister!” he said. Then Jorell punched him too, Mike said. He and Jorell quickly got into the car and peeled out.
Mike couldn’t remember any more specifics about the incident, which had taken place almost three years ago. It all happened in a flash. The police weren’t called, but one thing was clear: Jorell had made an enemy that night. In fact, he’d made a whole family of enemies.
I didn’t have to pry these details out of Mike; it seemed almost cathartic for him to share memories of a violent incident that unfolded right before his eyes.
“I couldn’t believe it, Ben,” he said. “Jorell just lost it.”
I didn’t know what to think. Playing the scene in my mind’s eye was almost like watching a movie, except the part of Jorell was played by someone altogether different. Punching a woman just didn’t align with the Jorell I knew.
Jorell never revealed his temper to me. Not once did I see him lose control, or even so much as swear loudly.
But following his death, many people spoke to me of his volatility. When he was only nine or ten, Joe said, he threatened his mother when they had a disagreement. “I’ll pick up a brick, and I’ll bust your head,” he told her, in Joe’s recollection. Jorell’s friend Nett called him a “ticking time bomb” who “fought everyone in the family.” Apparently he didn’t hesitate to pull out his gun at the smallest provocation—his friend Big Ant said he suffered from a Napoleon complex. Once, Jorell had a dispute with an associate while they were riding in a car, which culminated in Jorell spitting on him. The guy’s nickname? Killa.
You have to be pretty brazen to antagonize someone named Killa.
Another person who testified to Jorell’s menace was Lacey Plumb, the woman responsible for the disparaging comment on my Riverfront Times obituary. “Lived by the street, got his ass killed by the streets!” she wrote. Eventually, I got ahold of her. She was living in Arkansas, where she’d originally met Jorell’s older brother Jermaine, before moving in with him in the Cleveland house. Their relationship didn’t last; each had ugly accusations against the other. But when I wrote to Lacey, she accused Jorell of assaulting her.
“I had a very traumatic experience,” she wrote back. “I was assaulted while living there on 2 occasions once being by Jorell.”
Lacey didn’t go into further details. She still needed more time to reflect on the incidents, she said.
She sounded credible. I tended to believe her account, especially considering that at the Ferguson bodega Jorell had apparently assaulted another woman, Marsha James, the wife of the man who would become a suspect in his murder. As much as I didn’t want to believe Jorell was capable of such horrific behavior, it was becoming apparent that he was.
Back at the courthouse on that winter morning in 2019, as we waited to hear from Mike’s lawyer, Mike described the fallout from the incident at R&R Mini Mart & Liquor.
Mike wasn’t with Jorell on the Fourth of July in 2016 when Jorell next saw Marsha James, only a few days after he’d punched her at R&R. But Jorell told Mike about it afterward.
Jorell was again headed to R&R, but this time on foot. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, Danielle, and another of his friends. Jorell had purchased fireworks for the occasion, and they started the Independence Day celebration early. “They were walking up and down the street shooting fireworks,” said Mike.
I could imagine the scene. People go all out for the Fourth of July in St. Louis. Even though lighting fireworks is illegal in both the city and the county, that doesn’t stop many from detonating elaborate works right in the middle of streets. The madness begins well before nightfall, and liquor and marijuana inevitably get involved. By the time it’s over, scores of adults and children have landed in emergency rooms with fireworks-related injuries.
Jorell and his group soon passed in front of Marsha James’s home, Mike explained to me. I later visited the area. The modest, pale bungalows on the block are spaced about twenty feet apart, with oversize backyards of thick grass and weedy vines. Kids play outside, and people arrive on Sundays for church nearby. The short distance between the Cleveland home and the James household explained how Marsha could know Jorell and Mike by reputation, and be wary of her brother hanging out with them, as she’d said at the bodega.
On this night it wasn’t yet dark when Marsha, who was either out in front of her home or looking out the front window, recognized Jorell passing by. She told her husband, Chauncey James, the murder suspect, who proceeded to address Jorell and walk toward him.
“Hey bro, come and let me holler at you,” Chauncey said, acting as if he were interested in making a weed purchase.
Jorell had his Lacoste manpurse with him—the one I’d tried to open when he stayed with us. It likely contained marijuana he had for sale. Even though Jorell didn’t know this man, Jorell was nonetheless prepared to transact right there. He asked Chauncey specifically what he wanted.
“As he started to pull his weed out, dude just punched Jorell dead in his mouth,” Mike said.
Jorell immediately dropped his bag, pulled out his gun, and began firing. Chauncey James went running back behind the couple’s house.
“You wanna play with guns? Okay, I’ma kill you!” Chauncey yelled, in Mike’s telling.
“I should kill you right now, then!” Jorell responded.
By now Marsha James was screaming for mercy. Danielle also desperately urged Jorell to leave the premises. “You’ll go to jail,” she wailed.
Jorell relented, and they hustled back to the Cleveland house, where Jorell described to Mike what had transpired. But Jorell hadn’t calmed down; he wanted to turn around and go right back, “to whoop him,” Mike said. Danielle intervened, however, and convinced him to stay put.
I could barely make sense of what I was hearing. This story sounded incredible to me. During Jorell’s life I had no idea that he regularly kept a gun on him, or that he sold weed.
These turned out to be two more aspects of Jorell’s life that he kept from me. And though the Ferguson Police Department had no record of this incident, Jorell’s sister Peaches would confirm much of Mike’s account.
Yet there remained many things I couldn’t understand. Why would neither Chauncey James nor his wife Marsha—nor any of the neighbors—have reported this shooting? Could the gunshots have been mistaken for Fourth of July fireworks?
Had Jorell really become so unhinged that he would shoot at someone?
And then, finally, there was the most important question of all: Had Chauncey James retaliated for these incidents by killing Jorell?
I chewed on the possibility that this man murdered Jorell. I considered the idea that something so small, so silly—a dispute in a liquor store parking lot—might have led to his undoing. It depressed me profoundly.
I got to work learning everything I could about Chauncey James. Born in 1983, he was raised in Pagedale, the inner-ring North County suburb where, coincidentally, Jorell is now buried. He was fourteen years older than Jorell, and married with, I believe, two daughters. Having previously served as a security officer, he now cut hair. Sometimes wearing a tuft of chin hair and diamond earrings, he had silver grills on his teeth and tattoos all over his neck, chest, and arms.
I’d never met him in person, but he left a large internet footprint, posting photos of haircuts and beard touch-ups he’d given, pictures of his family, and occasionally unnerving Instagram posts. In one he wears a bulletproof vest; in another, posted four years after Jorell’s killing, he almost seems to take credit for it: “mfs crossed me,” it reads, “ain’t even cross em back, I crossed em out.”
He’d also uploaded dozens of YouTube videos, some intended to be humorous, like one where he torments his aunt by not providing her access to a restroom when she badly needs to go number two. In others he shows off assault rifles and looks intimidating. But mostly he posted rap videos. Though he hadn’t achieved a significant following, he clearly dreamed of hip-hop stardom, photographing himself in front of the famous Capitol Records building in LA, and in front of a mural of deceased rap icon Nipsey Hussle.
Chauncey James carried himself a bit like Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah (they have the same smile), but he lacked the lyrical acumen of the famous performer, as he delivered standard boasts about money, jewelry, women, and the violence he’d enact upon his foes. Sure, impersonating a nihilistic killer was common in St. Louis hip-hop. Yet some of his videos were genuinely frightening, with guys in ski masks and laser-sighted guns robbing people and taking them hostage.
The lyrics to one of his songs in particular really got to me. The track derides men who talk tough until a gun is in their face.
Then they call for God
“Please don’t take me out”
But James shows no mercy in the song, gunning his adversary down.
Performing alternately before a red brick wall and sitting on a set of frayed interior steps, an AK displayed behind him, he seemed to summon the words from deep within, mocking his victim and putting his hands together like a desperate man in prayer.
Why would someone boast about such a lack of humanity, even under the guise of a rap persona? I had to turn the video off. Unlike most of his lyrics, these didn’t seem like idle boasts. Something about the track sounded way too real.
Did it come from a true experience?
Could “Please don’t take me out” have been Jorell’s last words?
I was still processing this when I heard a related rumor that caught my attention. According to one of my sources, Chauncey James—whom Jorell allegedly shot at on the Fourth of July—was related to another one of Jorell’s enemies: the guy in the wheelchair who apparently bothered Jorell by flirting with Danielle.
It was unclear how they were related. But my source said James’s vehicle could regularly be seen parked in front of the house where the wheelchair man lived.
Further, my source heard rumors of a conversation in this house, which happened only a few days before Jorell died. In this conversation, someone said “something was about to happen” to Jorell.
It’s unclear who said this. It was a vague rumor, one that would be difficult to verify. Particularly because, as I soon learned, the man in the wheelchair had been killed sometime after Jorell’s death.
Details were sparse. But I was intrigued by the possibility that two people with strong grudges against Jorell were related—and that they may have been plotting together.
I spoke again with Joe Cleveland. He’d also learned about the drink-throwing incident and the Fourth of July altercation from Mike, and he had recognized the moody behavior in his son. “He should have been humble,” Joe told me. “Sure, she threw a drink on him, she might have made a mistake, but he shouldn’t have to retaliate every time somebody’s out there being stupid.”
As for Chauncey James, Joe couldn’t decide if he should take him seriously as a suspect. “I don’t know what to think, what to believe,” he said. After all, he had an incomplete picture. If Jorell encountered Chauncey or his wife, Marsha, again before his death, he didn’t mention it to anyone.
I was frustrated by the lack of available information. If only the detectives would collaborate with me, I believed, we could solve this case together.
More questions: How did Marsha James and her brother—both of whom Jorell had punched at R&R, according to Mike—play into all of this? Remember, Jorell and the brother knew each other; his asking Jorell for weed had set this chain of events in motion.
Further, Jorell had been shot in broad daylight. Had there been any witnesses? Had any of them identified Chauncey James as the shooter? There were signs pointing toward his potential guilt. He seemed to have a clear motive: anger at Jorell’s treatment of his wife, and fear for their lives. So why had the police let him go?
To me, Chauncey James seemed a clear person of interest in Jorell’s murder. In my investigation, I considered him suspect #1. But not everyone felt he was guilty. In fact, many of Jorell’s friends and family believed a different man was responsible for his death, someone to whom the police never spoke.
This young man was named Leron White. He lived in the neighboring municipality of Kinloch, where Jorell was killed. I began considering him suspect #2. Leron was about a year younger than Jorell, and was a particularly complicated figure in Jorell’s life.
For starters, Jorell considered him a friend.