Shortly after 6 p.m. on April 18, 2012, Chattanooga Police Investigator Joseph Montijo said Tuesday in Hamilton County Criminal Court, he was called to 1643 Ocoee St. where taxi driver Nathan Deere had been found slumped over in his blood-stained Millennium cab.
The crime scene investigator said he went to Erlanger Hospital and ran DNA and blood tests on the comatose victim, who died the following day, and then returned to the crime scene on Ocoee to process evidence found there.
Around midnight that same day, after Investigator Montijo had gone off duty and returned home, he was called back to the police service center, he told jurors.
This time, he said, his job was to run blood, DNA and other tests on 18-year-old Christopher Christian Padgett – the suspected killer, already in custody.
He need not have hurried.
Four and a half years later, the case against Padgett is just now going to trial. If things go as planned, a jury soon will get to decide whether he is guilty of the first-degree murder and other charges he faces.
Despite an earlier request that his trial be moved to another jurisdiction due to unfavorable publicity, it is being held in Chattanooga. The widespread publicity never materialized and Tuesday’s courtroom contained lots of empty seats.
Tuesday, in meticulous detail, Investigator Montijo described his part in the investigation of the fatal shooting, and the evidence discovered at and near the crime scene.
He said blood stains on the inner edges of both the driver and passenger front seats in the cab – as well as clothing and other objects lying on the floor between them – clearly indicated a major trauma had taken place inside the vehicle.
There was so much blood, he said, that it sometimes made collecting evidence difficult. For example, he said, a $5 bill lying on the floor, the only money found in the cab, was so thoroughly saturated that it was impossible to get fingerprints off it.
However, he said, police were able to find other evidence. For example, he noted, there was a trampled “path” through the tall grass in a nearby field leading away from the cab.
After following the direction of the trail for less than a block, investigators came to the backyard of 1700 Olive where they located a cell phone that turned out to belong to Nathan Deere.
The trial will resume Wednesday morning.