Utah man wanted in Michigan murder investigation was under surveillance earlier this year
A suspect in a Michigan homicide investigation who is believed to have been recently living in Utah was being watched by Utah authorities earlier this year for about two months, according to police.
An arrest warrant for 42-year-old Chadwick Shane Mobley has been issued out of Michigan for investigation of murder, police confirmed Wednesday.
Last week, the Utah State Bureau of Investigation said it had been asked by Michigan State Police to help locate Mobley in connection with a 2011 murder investigation. Mobley was last seen in Corrine, Box Elder County, on June 7, according to Utah authorities.
But agents were keeping surveillance on Mobley in February, according to a newly unsealed search warrant affidavit filed in Utah on behalf of Michigan police.
Andrea Eilber, 20, was found shot to death in Lapeer County, Michigan, in an area about 30 minutes outside of Flint, in 2011. Kenneth Grondin, then 19, Eilber's boyfriend, was arrested and charged with murder.
Grondin was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But in 2018, he "was granted an appeal based on faulty language on the jury verdict instruction form. He was subsequently released from prison and a new trial was ordered," according to court documents. Media reports in Michigan say Eilber is on house arrest and is expected to go to trial again later this year.
According to the affidavit in Utah, a cigarette butt was one of the pieces of evidence collected near the Michigan crime scene. DNA collected from the cigarette showed a single male profile. But after comparing it with 36 other DNA samples from people believed to be connected to the case, no match was found, the affidavit states.
In 2019, Michigan police requested DNA familial genealogy testing on the cigarette butt and requested funding for it in 2020, but the "attempts and requests were unsuccessful due to incorrect information on property items and budget constraints from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic."
In 2022, a private lab in Texas specializing in genetic genealogy testing took the sample. In January, the lab notified police that the DNA may be linked to a man living in Utah, according to the affidavit. At the time, Mobley was listed as living in Brigham City.
Michigan police further learned that Mobley had lived in Auburn Hills in 2011, about 40 miles away from Lapeer, according to the warrant, and was employed in Pontiac.
The Utah Department of Public Safety was contacted and investigators held surveillance on Mobley for two months, the affidavit says. During that time, they learned that the long-haul truck driver did not have a permanent residence, but appeared to live out of his semitruck. His personal vehicle was typically parked near the Walmart Distribution Center in Corinne.
"Chadwick has never been observed to discard or abandon any object known to have been in his mouth. He has never been observed by Utah Department of Public Safety/State Bureau of Investigation to converse or visit any residence, restaurant, nor any other building location unrelated to work. Chadwick has been observed to be a smoker of cigarettes," according to the affidavit.
On Feb. 28, investigators watched Mobley walking a dog and saw him collect dog feces in a plastic bag, tie it in a knot and throw it away. Police collected the knotted portion of the bag to be tested for DNA, the affidavit says, but the test was not successful.
It was not immediately known on Wednesday whether an additional DNA sample was found or what piece of evidence may have been collected that prompted an arrest warrant to be issued.
