Defense attorneys began working in earnest on Wednesday to cast doubt on the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office’s investigation into a 2022 double homicide in Bigfork. 

Prosecutors have accused Derrick James Jackson, 39, of shooting dead his 62-year-old mother Tricia DeMotts and her 65-year-old partner Stanley Grotberg in their Esteban Lane home on Oct. 28, 2022. Jackson, arrested hours before deputies discovered the bodies, has pleaded not guilty in Flathead County District Court to two counts of deliberate homicide and one count each of tampering with evidence and drug possession.  

Judge Amy Eddy is presiding over the trial, which began March 31 and is scheduled through early next week.  

Deputy County Attorney Amy Kenison told jurors in her opening statement on Monday that evidence would link Jackson to the gun used in the deaths of Grotberg and DeMotts. His fingerprints allegedly were on the gun case where the .40-caliber Smith and Wesson that killed the couple was stored, that same gun later found near where deputies arrested Jackson. Casings ejected from the weapon were retrieved from the murder scene, she said, and gunshot residue was found on Jackson’s clothes.  

Witnesses called by Kenison and fellow prosecutor Deputy County Attorney Katie Handley in the intervening two days have included the deputies who arrested Jackson and found the bodies of Grotberg and DeMotts during a subsequent welfare check, Esteban Lane residents who reported Jackson acting strangely that day, Jackson’s father, crime scene technicians and medical examiners.  

Jurors have also seen body camera footage of a barely coherent Jackson during his arrest, reluctant to comply with commands from law enforcement and struggling to answer questions about his actions that day. 

Defense attorneys Tom Schoenleben and Levi Roadman had asked jurors to keep an open mind and pledged to expose what they called the assumptions, inferences and speculation undergirding the case against Jackson. Through cross examination, they have pointed to Grotberg as a possible source of abuse in the home all three shared on Esteban Lane and suggested that investigators started with Jackson as a suspect and worked their way backward.  

DURING WEDNESDAY’S testimony, jurors heard from Kate Mason, who oversees the Sheriff’s Office crime scene team, as she recounted collecting evidence from the Esteban Lane home. That included cataloguing casings located in the bedroom, which is where DeMotts and Grotberg were located, as well as samples of blood found there and in the nearby kitchen.  

Crime scene team members also recovered a pitchfork from the bedroom, which was shown to jurors during Mason’s time on the witness stand.  

She testified that the items sent to the Montana State Crime Lab included the clothes Jackson was wearing during his arrest — jeans, hooded sweatshirt, boots — as well as the gun and ammunition for it, casings and a gun case found in Grotberg’s Nissan Pathfinder. They also sent a buccal swab, used to collect DNA, collected from Jackson’s mouth, Mason said.  

Investigators had requested that Jackson’s clothes undergo testing for gunshot residue, Mason said.  

But they hadn’t asked the same of the clothes DeMotts and Grotberg were wearing, Schoenleben noted. Investigators bagged each of the victims’ hands to preserve evidence, had they performed gunshot residue testing on those, he asked.  

“No,” Mason replied.  

Schoenleben repeatedly asked Mason about red marks, which he deemed possible abrasions, visible in photographs of Jackson’s hands, including a small cut on a ring finger. The photographs, taken at the county jail, also captured bruising on his side and on his shins, Schoenleben asserted. 

While not major wounds, did they suggest Jackson had suffered some injuries prior to his arrest, he asked. Mason agreed. 

He also quizzed Mason on the possible location in the bedroom where the gun had gone off. Given that the casings eject from the right side of the firearm, the gun could have been fired from either end of the room, he argued.  

Prosecutors had earlier noted that investigators found a bullet hole in the wall farthest from the door.  

Schoenleben asked other investigators about the decision to examine Jackson and his clothing for gunshot residue but not either DeMotts or Grotberg, including Deputy Jamie Meyer, who helped collect evidence, and Dr. Sunil Prashar, a former medical examiner with the state who performed the autopsies.  

Meyers said she was not asked to use a gunshot residue kit on the two bodies. Prashar told Schoenleben that he could not recall whether investigators asked for the testing. His office could perform the tests, he said, but only did so when requested.  

SCHOENLEBEN AND Roadman began poking at the prosecution’s explanation of events leading up to DeMotts’ and Grotberg’s deaths on Tuesday. When Aaron Westphal, then a corporal with the Sheriff’s Office, described struggling to understand Jackson during his arrest on a neighboring property on Esteban Lane, Roadman asked whether he had dealt with victims of trauma or shock in his career.  

“I suppose that I have,” Westphal replied.  

“Is confusion one of the signs that you’ve observed?” Roadman asked.  

“It’s possible but I can’t think of [of an example].” Westphal answered.  

Roadman also latched onto several statements Jackson purportedly made to his father, John Jackson, and a family friend during a visit inside the county jail following his arrest. Prosecutors played the video after calling John Jackson to the stand late Tuesday afternoon. Much of what Derrick Jackson said, from behind a glass window, was inaudible when played in the courtroom.  

Roadman noted that John Jackson seemed to repeat several of the statements back to his son. That included Derrick Jackson apparently saying he had tried to avoid being killed and that he was defending himself, according to Roadman and John Jackson. Roadman said that Derrick Jackson had accused Grotberg of abusing DeMotts in the video.  

But John Jackson reiterated he was ignorant of what happened on Oct. 28, 2022.

“Your testimony is still, right now as you sit here, that you have no idea what happened out there?” Roadman asked.   

“Nothing,” John Jackson replied.  

News Editor Derrick Perkins can be reached at 758-4430 or [email protected].