HARRISBURG, Ill. - There were plenty of people last summer who opined that there was something hinky about a guy in Marion claiming to have been shot RIGHT before he was to go off to IDOC...and they were right.
It appears that he was a victim of a possible ongoing drug war feud, and the arrest of the guy alleged to have done it has now brought it all to the fore.
As you can read at the article at this link, Jayden (also Jaydon, apparently depending on what day it is and who's typing) Emmons, 21, was shot in the chest last July. He went to Heartland Regional Medical Center in Marion for treatment, and likely we'd have never found out about it if we hadn't happened to have a source in the immediate area when Emmons walked in.
Because he arrived at the Marion facility, that lead people to believe that he'd been shot in Marion, and we all waited for a report of that...which never came.
That's because he wasn't shot in Marion. He was shot in Harrisburg. And rather than go to the hospital in Harrisburg, or even Ferrell in Eldorado roughly seven minutes to the east, he was SO injured and in SO much pain that he or someone with him drove him a half-hour west to Marion. Which isn't even a trauma hospital.
So as it turns out, the arrest of Alexander McWilliams a couple of days ago, we found out today with a little help from the authorities, was for the shooting of Jayden/don Emmons. In Harrisburg. Last July.
Making it all the more interesting is the fact that Emmons was literally hours away from being transported to Illinois Department of Corrections for his part in the burglary and gun theft of Gunslingers in the Eldorado area in early 2016, when he was shot and had to undergo treatment...keeping him from making that IDOC deadline. Which we don't know what it was, because then-prosecutor Jayson Clark, too busy with impregnating office staff and trying to save his job in the upcoming election, wasn't helping anyone with much info (we did get a press release, which you can read at this link). So we all kind of floundered out here and dealt with it, and it was put on one of those back burners...until this week, when McWilliams was arrested.
We couldn't figure out which unsolved "shooting" out of a legion of them in Harrisburg McWilliams was arrested for, so we did a little investigating and this is what we learned today. Surprise. The gang activity in Harrisburg - whether anyone calls it that or not, the fact remains that that's EXACTLY what it is, and they're all into stacks n rolls n dopeslinging and the occasional bullet-slinging - has been underway for several years. Mike Henshaw knew it and called it what it was. Kinda makes us rethink the official story about how he died.
And it just almost, very nearly, closecloseclosely appears that this Emmons shooting last year might have been the result of all of this ongoing animosity between the factions.
So tell your friends; share this across your social networking...and praise new prosecutor Molly Kasiar's office. At least they're going after the hard cases and not wilting in the face of them, backing down with plea deals. And that's exactly what we've needed in Saline County since the death of our beloved Mike.