He killed man with shotgun in Lakewood, then fled to Oregon. Here’s his sentence
A 49-year-old man who killed a person at a Lakewood apartment over threats made to a woman the man was a father figure to was sentenced last week to more than a 16 years in prison.
Murray Maurice Edwards pleaded guilty in February in Pierce County Superior Court to second-degree murder in the Oct. 21, 2021, fatal shooting of Warren Eugene Jackson Jr. According to court records, Edwards went to an apartment Jackson was staying at that night and fired a shotgun through the front door, striking the man in the thigh. The victim died of blood loss.
Judge TaTeasha Davis ordered Edwards to 16 years, eight months in prison for the murder, a punishment toward the low end of the standard sentencing range for defendants tried in similar cases.
Edwards was arrested more than a month after the murder in southwestern Oregon after the FBI informed state police he was traveling south on Interstate 5 in Josephine County. The defendant was taken into custody after he crashed his car while fleeing authorities.
Other charges Edwards faced were dropped as part of a plea agreement, including first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm, four counts of tampering with a witness and attempted tampering with physical evidence. According to court records, Edwards has several prior felony convictions, including a 1993 federal conviction in California for unlawful delivery of a controlled substance and Pierce County convictions in 2003 and 2012 for first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm and forgery, respectively.
The shooting stemmed from a dispute over a car taken from Jackson that led to the victim threatening to beat the woman who took it, according to charging documents. The car was a 2003 Mercury Marquis that Jackson’s father told Lakewood Police Department detectives was taken from his son three days before his murder.
Days after Jackson was shot, Kent police found the car, and the driver fled, eventually crashed and ran away. Inside, police found a purse and documents belonging to the woman who’d taken the Mercury.
Lakewood detectives interviewed the woman who’d taken the car, her mother and a man who rented the apartment where Jackson had been staying. Detectives learned that the night before Jackson was killed he had a conversation with the mother. According to the declaration for determination of probable cause, Jackson threatened to beat the woman’s daughter if his car wasn’t returned, and he said she should tell Edwards what he said.
The man who was renting the apartment told detectives Edwards wouldn’t have taken those threats lightly. Detectives learned the mother was a longtime romantic friend of Edwards, according to the probable cause document, and records state the renter said the defendant had looked out for the mother’s daughter over the years.
On the day of the shooting, Edwards told the mother to call the renter and tell him he was going to his apartment, and “whoever threatened his daughter last night, he was going to ‘smoke them,’” according to the probable cause document. Detectives confirmed through phone records that the mother called the renter and Jackson to warn them.
At the end of November, detectives obtained cell phone records for Edwards’ phone from Oct. 15 to 23. Records state a phone expert analyzed the data and learned the man’s phone was at or near the crime scene at the time of the shooting.
When prosecutors charged Edwards the next month, he wasn’t in custody. Detectives were then granted a phone-trace order for his phone, and they started tracking him Dec. 6. Detectives saw his phone was moving south on Interstate 5, and they informed the FBI of his whereabouts.
