An Arapahoe County grand jury has indicted four people on felony murder charges in connection to the shooting of University of Colorado engineering student Andrew Graham, who was found dead on the lawn of a home in Centennial on Nov. 6, 2009.
Clarissa Lockhart, Allen Deshawn Ford, Kendall Austin and Joseph Jamal Martin, all 26-years old, have been arrested and indicted on first-degree felony murder and racketeering charges in Graham’s death, sources say.
Martin has already entered a plea and been sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery, state court spokesman Rob McCallum said.
Each of them are also charged with a pattern of racketeering. The suspects had allegedly been involved in a series of incidents in Denver in 2009 in which groups of young black people randomly attacked white people, mostly in Lower Downtown.
The indictments were first reported Wednesday by CBS4’s Brian Maass. He said an Arapahoe County grand jury indicted the four in January 2017 and they all were arrested within days. However, their cases were suppressed, meaning information about their cases, including the conviction of Martin, were shielded from public view.
The shooting happened on Nov. 5, 2009. Graham had taken a bus to Boulder to find a house to rent with three friends while attending graduate school. A security camera at the light-rail station at County Line Road and Interstate 25 captured the robbery. It was 11:40 p.m. He was less than a mile from home.
His body was found at about 5:30 a.m. the next morning in the front yard of a home on the 8700 block of East Phillips Place in Centennial by a homeowner awakened by his barking dogs.
It didn’t take long before the investigation pointed to five suspects including a 16-year-old that sheriff’s investigators believe shot Graham.
Graham was preparing to attend graduate school after earning a civil engineering degree at the University of Colorado and working briefly in Dubai for an oil exploration company.
Cyndi Gelston-Graham, Graham’s mother, has said her son’s friends considered him a Renaissance man. Graham was a black belt in taekwondo, loved listening to jazz and blues music, and was a superb “mamabird,” or ultimate Frisbee player on a team at CU.
Andrew earned his nickname “Stitches” when he collided head to head with a teammate nicknamed “Rabbit” at practice. Both ended up in the emergency room to get sewn up. Andrew received 32 stitches and Rabbit has a scar on his forehead. Gelston-Graham says Rabbit thinks of Stitches every time he looks in the mirror.
