Assuming Brown was napping after his exam earlier in the day, Cole went to wake him up. But when he touched his leg he noticed Brown was cold. Cole moved Brown’s arm and saw the pool of blood that had formed underneath his head.

Brown died from a bullet wound to the back of his head.

Now, nearly a year after the homicides of Brown and his roommate, a 23-year-old St. Johns, Mich., man, Owen Goodenow, the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office has begun presenting its case against the alleged assailants.

New information on the incident was brought to light Wednesday in the preliminary examination of the two men charged with the homicides, Benjamin French and David Marion Jr.

Ingham County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Crino presented almost a dozen witnesses on Wednesday, including Cole, members of the Lansing Police and Fire departments, Michigan State Police officers, FBI investigators and the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsies on Brown and Goodenow.

The defense did not call any witnesses, and the examination is scheduled to continue today.
Cole said he attended Lansing Catholic High School with both the victims and the accused and has known French and Marion since the seventh grade.

Marion frequently would come over to the house and would sleep over three or four nights a week, Cole said. Cole said Marion was most friendly with Brown.

Cole said the first time he saw French at his house was two weeks prior to the murders when he, French, Marion and Brown were smoking marijuana in one of the back rooms. At the trial, FBI special agent Pat Kelly said the FBI was asked to help with the investigation because evidence showed the incident might have been a drug-related homicide, making it a federal offense.

Kelly said the reason French and Marion entered the house might have been to take a large amount of marijuana Goodenow had hidden in his room.

“A safe was removed from the house with a bag of marijuana inside,” he said. “(The killings) could have been drug related.”

Cole said the safe normally was in plain sight, but when he went into Goodenow’s room and found his body, the safe was gone. He also said the door to Brown’s room had been kicked in and his possessions appeared to have been thrown around.

The examination began at 10 a.m. and was adjourned at about 4:30 p.m. Crino said he was happy with the first day’s proceedings.

“In terms of what we want to accomplish, we accomplished (it all) today,” Crino said. “We still have a lot more work to do tomorrow.”

Michelle Elieff, a forensic pathologist at Sparrow Hospital, conducted an autopsy on both bodies and concluded both men died from bullet wounds to the head.

Upon examining the bodies, Elieff discovered Brown was shot in the back of the head near his left ear.

Elieff said a bullet hit Goodenow in the right side of his forehead, traveled through his head and exited on the left side of his head near his ear.

“In this particular case (the stifling) is extremely good evidence that this was the entrance wound,” Elieff said of Goodenow’s wound. “(The shot was taken from) intermediate range; the firearm was not directly on the skin, nor was it from a great distance.”

The toxicology reports from the autopsy revealed both victims had tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, in their systems when they died and Brown had amphetamines in his urine, Elieff said.