‘Time can be on your side’: Murfreesboro detectives revisit 14-year-old cold case
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WKRN) — “You better get off the street, they’re about to light it up.”
Those were some of the last words heard before gunfire erupted on Eagle Street on May 22, 2010, killing 24-year-old Nathan Morgan and injuring two others.
According to Lt. James Abbott, who oversees the Murfreesboro Police Department’s Violent Crimes Unit, Morgan and his friends were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Nathan Morgan had nothing to do with this,” Abbott said. “He just had pulled up, got out of his car to see, talked to some friends and was gunned down… They literally were just friends talking in front of a house on Eagle Street.”
Investigators believe the shooter came from one street over, jumped a chain link fence and then, from a couple houses down, positioned himself with an assault rifle and opened fire. One of the people in the area got a phone call warning them to get off the street just before the gunfire rang out.
However, police are still working to prove who all was involved. Abbott has been trying to crack the case since he was first assigned to investigate Morgan’s murder 14 years ago. It has since been reviewed several times, with investigators again revisiting the case at the end of last year.
After several interviews over a three-to-four-month period and a recent search of a residence to see if anything was missed during the initial investigation, Abbott said that unfortunately those efforts “turned up nothing.”
‘These individuals are still hiding behind attorneys’
It’s been a frustrating endeavor for the lieutenant who said a handful of potential suspects were identified early on in the investigation. According to Abbott, many of those names “still have not changed,” but getting someone to corroborate the events that took place that night has been difficult.
“These individuals are still hiding behind attorneys,” Abbott said. “We actually heard from an attorney just in the past four weeks, from the last person of interest we were trying to re-interview, whose attorney informed us was still not willing to talk to us here 14 years later.”
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A lot of people who did come forward initially were afraid of “retaliation,” and Abbott believes that is likely the case for others, although no criminal charges would be pressed against witnesses.
When Morgan was accidentally caught up in the gunfire that night, police think it was likely a part of a retaliation for another shooting that had happened only a few weeks beforehand.
Authorities have confirmed that Morgan was not at the 700 block of Memorial Boulevard when the prior shooting happened, but some of the people he and his friends were with on the night of May 22, 2010, might have been.
Although the cases are not directly linked, police suspect the shooting that killed Morgan’s cousin, 23-year-old Cedrick Herbert, only about one year earlier was also motivated by retaliation. However, that case also remains unsolved.
“We’ve got a lot of good, solid persons of interest in those cases. These are the kind of cases that can be solved if people would just cooperate,” Abbott said. “Sadly, that lack of cooperation is part of the problem.”
Some vital witnesses have also since passed away. One of the individuals who was standing with Morgan and his friends that night was shot and killed in an unreleated homicide in 2016. Still, Abbott believes time may be on his side in more way than one.
New technology could help advance the case
As technology advances over time, it opens up more opportunities for solving cold cases with physical evidence. In the initial days of the investigation, police collected a number of shell casings from Eagle Street and submitted them to a lab in hopes that it would help them track down the weapon used.
That analysis led investigators nowhere, but now Abbott said new technology is emerging where forensic scientists are able to retrieve fingerprint and DNA evidence from shell casings.
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“So, we’re kind of waiting to see if that does come to fruition,” Abbott said. “And then we would probably submit, we’d look at the casings and see which ones that had not been too badly handled in the initial investigation.”
It’s also still possible that one day the suspect’s firearm may turn up as Abbott said guns used in crimes are often passed off to multiple people. And with time, keeping a secret can start to weigh on people.
“Often, other individuals that may have been involved with criminal groups or gangs in these types of situations, sometimes they will age out of that crime and decide, ‘Hey, I’m 30 or 45 years old now, I need to do the right thing’,” he said. “So, a lot of times, time can be on your side.”
If anything, Abbott said he hopes someone comes forward in order to finally give Morgan’s family some peace of mind. Morgan’s only daughter was 7 years old when he was killed and has since graduated from high school, without ever knowing who is responsible for her father’s death.
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“We know we kind of have our persons of interest,” Abbott said. “To those that are refusing to cooperate or have refused to cooperate in the past, you know, this could be your family; this could be your brother; this could be your cousin; this could be your father or your son that could be murdered tomorrow.”
Anyone with information is urged to contact the Murfreesboro Police Criminal Investigations Division at 615-893-2717 or email crimetips@murfreesborotn.gov.
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