Special prosecutor issues statement after filing Jake Gardner’s death certificate

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - Special Prosecutor Frederick Franklin filed a copy of the death certificate of Jake Gardner, the man indicted by a grand jury in the shooting death of James Scurlock during George Floyd protests downtown in May, on Tuesday along with a request for an official dismissal of the indictment.

The death certificate serves as an official record of Gardner’s suicide, stating his cause of death as a gunshot wound to the head by a handgun on Sept. 20 in a parking lot in Hillsboro, Ore.

According to the document, no autopsy was performed, and Gardner, 38, was cremated.

Following the filing, the special prosecutor released a statement Tuesday, noting it was not a grand jury report.

“Given the community interest in this case and since there will not be a trial, I have decided to provide the statement below as my report of the of the evidence reviewed by my team and I,” the statement says.

In the nine-page document, Franklin again walks through details of the incident as he did following the announcement of the grand jury’s decision,  but he also includes details on a 911 call from Gardner and about events leading up to the shooting, before responding to criticism.

"I have been accused of having had an ‘agenda’ concerning the presentation I made to the Grand Jury investigating the shooting of James Scurlock,” the statement read. “I did have an agenda. My agenda was for my team and I to review the investigation including approximately 60 interviews conducted by the Homicide Unit of the Omaha Police Department, seek out the existence of any additional evidence, and to follow that evidence to assess whether any of it was consistent with potential violations of Nebraska Criminal Statutes. It took my team and I nearly two months to thoroughly review that evidence and determine what was relevant...

"I did NOT have any agenda as to any outcome, understanding that fidelity to the process mandated that the relevant evidence be followed and presented, rather than to pursue a predetermined conclusion, based on an allegiance to a political party or racial affiliation, or especially on uncorroborated statements by Jake Gardner to the Omaha Police.”

Some of the new details about events leading up to Scurlock’s death include a 911 call that Gardner placed “though officers with the Omaha Police Department were literally seconds away and, on every corner surrounding his business," Franklin states. In that call, Gardner claimed his business was being shot at and “that [he] just wanted to call in and make sure that (he) was on the record for this,” Franklin said in his statement before posing a question in parenthesis:

“It begs the question, was Gardner alerting the 911 operator that he wanted the ‘record’ to document an anticipated need to return gunfire in self-defense, since he reported that his business was being shot at?”

In his statement, Franklin says that while Gardner could have argued he was protecting his property when the shooting occurred, “he didn’t protect it. He did not stand in front of the businesses, with or without his firearms, as a deterrent to looters or vandals. There is no evidence that he did anything to stop the vandalism that was occurring while he was inside his business with the lights off.”

The evidence, according to Franklin, shows that Gardner “allowed the vandalism to occur while awaiting the entry of looters, so as to use his firearms on them" and that Gardner “well knew that ...James Scurlock was not the individual responsible for his father being pushed.”

Franklin also defended the count of “terroristic threats,” stating that “self-defense” did not apply in the prosecution of that count. “The evidence suggests that Gardner was threatening the use of deadly force and was doing so prior to having been jumped,” he says in the statement.

Franklin also defended the integrity of the grand jury.

“The Grand Jury did not assess the likelihood of success at trial,” Franklin’s statement continued. “They were only deciding if the evidence was sufficient for Gardner to be charged. Stated simply, the Grand Jury was not assessing the end game for this matter, something apparently done by the County Attorney given, his early and committed belief in a potential self-defense claim. Rather, the Grand Jury was only looking at whether there should be a beginning. In our system of criminal justice, criminally charging someone is NOT the same as determining one’s guilt or innocence."