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27-year-old Jonathan Crews was found dead from a gunshot wound while lying in his bed. His girlfriend, Brenda Lazaro, was at the scene and said he took his own life to prove his love to her. His family believes he was murdered, but the medical examiner ruled his death as "undetermined."
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It started on Superbowl Sunday, 2014, it was the Seahawks versus the Broncos. Many people were having parties this night and Johnathan Crews was invited to one, but he declined because he had just moved into his new apartment, and he had so much to get done. His friend Emily texted him while she was at the party to let him know that the people throwing the party had a couch for sale. So, she said, hey here’s some pictures, you might be interested in this couch, but he didn’t respond.
A call went out to 911 at 11:30 PM on February 2nd, 2014, and it was Jonathan’s girlfriend, Brenda Lazaro. She was crying and repeats: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Please, somebody help.” The dispatcher attempted to calm her down and asked where she was. Brenda says, “At the apartments!” The dispatcher asked which apartments she was in, and she said “I don’t know, I don’t know. Please. Please...He’s dying, he’s dying.” She shouts the apartment number “Eight one three!” She repeated the number twice before saying she’s near the corner of Belt Line Road and MacArthur Boulevard, in Coppel (cuh-pell), but she didn’t know the name of the apartment complex.
Brenda spent most of her childhood in Mexico and struggled with some of her English. She told the dispatcher that “he shoot himself.” “He’s shooting himself on the heart. And he’s dying right now.” Three minutes into the call, the dispatcher still couldn’t figure out which apartment complex they were in and Brenda was repeating her boyfriend’s name, “Jonathan? Jonathan?” The dispatcher asked if he shot himself on purpose and Brenda says “No!” Then she says, “Yeah, he did it on purpose.” The dispatcher asked where he shot himself and she said she didn’t know, “There’s too much blood. I’m just pressing on it.”
Johnathan had only lived in the apartment for a week. They were four minutes into the call and Brenda still couldn’t provide the name of the complex. The dispatcher asked her to look around for some mail and she said there wasn’t any, so he instructed her to go to knock on the neighbor’s door to verify the address. She said, “No, I don’t want to leave him alone.” After six minutes, the dispatcher tells her again that she needs to go get the name of the complex and she shouts, “Oh, my God, I think he’s dead!” The dispatcher responds, “I need you to go now! Go now!”
Eight minutes into the call, Brenda found a neighbor and they told her the name of the complex, Riverchase Apartments. The dispatcher told Brenda to say outside and she walked back into the bedroom and said, “He’s dead!”
The dispatcher stayed on the line and asked Brenda if she discovered her boyfriend like this and what did she see when she first walked into the apartment. He’s questioning what happened before the 911 call. Brenda says, “we were just having a discussion and we were just talking. He just said that he loves me, and I didn’t believe him. He said he was gonna prove that he loves me. I didn’t know that he had a gun.”
The paramedics arrived at 11:40 PM and they found 27-year-old Jonathan Crews in his bed. The covers were up to his waist and there was a gunshot wound to the left side of his chest. He was dead, slumped to his left, with both arms extended. The bullet from his own SIG Sauer 9 mm, went through his heart, lungs, and liver, then exited the right side of his back, into the bed. The gun was sitting next to him, on top of the blanket.
Jonathan’s parents, John and Pam Crews were at their home, just a few short miles from their son’s new apartment, with their son Christian and their daughter, Dani. Dani’s phone rang and it was Brenda and she said, he’s dead. Dani asked who was dead and Brenda said, it’s Jonathan. The family rushed to the apartment, and they were told that he had shot himself. They assumed Brenda was wrong and they believed an intruder must have been in the apartment and shot him. There was no way he would end his own life. His family told the police that Jonathan didn’t have a history of depression. He recently started a new job that he really liked, and he had just moved into his new apartment. He had grown up using guns and was trained in firearm safety.
His girlfriend, 26-year-old Brenda said no, it was definitely suicide. She told the police that she spent the night watching TV in his apartment and they were eating Chinese food and fighting about a woman named Emily. Brenda said she was at the foot of the bed, sitting on the floor and Jonathan told her to cover her ears and that’s when she heard the gunshot.
Jonathan and Brenda had met at Wu Yi Shaolin (sh-ow-lin), she was a teacher at a martial arts school in a Coppell strip mall, just a few blocks from the Riverchase Apartments. Jonathan’s sister, Dani was best friends with Brenda. She took classes at Wu Yi and Jonathan’s mom, Pam, also took classes there. Jonathan asked his sister’s permission to date her friend and she agreed as long as he promised not to ruin their friendship.
Jonathan was born in California, but he grew up in Irving. Pam stayed home to raise her three kids and John was a lawyer and a pastor at the nondenominational Heartland Church. Their son, Jonathan spent a lot of time with his grandfather in Montana and that’s where he learned how to shoot pistols. As he got older, he played the bass guitar and listened to Ozzy Osbourne and Green Day. He was quiet and laid-back. Jacob Ramsey met Jonathan in the ninth grade, and they were roommates for several years at Baylor. Jacob said, “I was a little bit jealous of him growing up. He was this super athletic, good-looking guy. And he had this ability to just always be this nice guy. Especially through college, I could just never get mad at him.”
Jonathan may have always been nice, but he was also the messy roommate, and he was a deep sleeper. He had to set three alarms to make sure he didn’t miss his classes. He set a traditional alarm clock, an alarm on his phone, and another alarm that vibrated his pillow and he also had a fourth alarm...sort of. Jacob says, “The fourth alarm was me hitting him in the head with my pillow.” During and after his college years, Jonathan had a handful of serious romances. His mom explained that he had “a pick-up-the-broken-baby-bird kind of thing” with women. His friends said he was a serial monogamist and he was sometimes trusting to a fault. His friend Jacob said, “He was the type of guy who liked to be somebody. He would always fall really hard and give the best of himself and a lot of money to a new relationship. H was always looking for a wife.”
When he dated a Muslim woman, he learned how to read and write some Urdu (Or-doo) and he bought a Quran (kuh-ron). Once his relationships were over, they were over. He didn’t get back together with the women, but he always stayed friends with his ex-girlfriends. In 2009, he graduated with a history degree and moved back to North Texas and worked at Dillard’s and that’s where he met his good friend, Emily. He said that she was the female version of him. He later got a job as an operations director at an urgent care clinic, and he organized a surprise baby shower for his co-worker. With the money from his new job, he was able to rent the apartment in Riverchase and this was his first time living on his own.
His girlfriend, Brenda Lazaro’s background isn’t as easy to piece together. A man she dated for more than four years says that she told him she was born at Parkland, in Dallas, but her sister, Isela Lazaro Garcia, said that Brenda was born in Oregon. When she was 5, Brenda’s family moved to Mexico, where her parents were from. Brenda told people that while she lived in Mexico, she witnessed a murder, but the details regarding who and where have varied. In one version of the story, she said her uncle was murdered in front of her by the Cartell and her family had to flee Mexico and that’s why she had such a hard time trusting people. One of Brenda’s best friends says that Brenda told her she was kidnapped with another girl and set free after the other girl was murdered.
When she was a teenager, her family moved to Irving and her father got a job installing solar panels. Her ex-boyfriend says she told him she was raped in high school and had a rough home life, and several friends remember her telling them she was pregnant a few times, but she never gave birth. According to a profile that was on the Wu Yi website, she started tai chi and kung fu at North Lake College in the spring of 2006. The owner of Wu Yi, Henry Su, said she was hardworking and reliable. He said, “She doesn’t say very much, but she’s appropriately friendly.”
After getting a Spanish degree from UTA, she worked as a subsitute teacher and taught classes at Wu Yi Shaolin (Sh-ow-lin) in the evenings. In May of 2013, she ended her four year relationship and in November of that year, she started dating Jonathan. He told people that she just understood him, and they were similar in ways that he had a hard time describing. His sister says that Brenda was always excited after seeing Jonathan and she talked about having a future with him. She wanted to get married and have kids.
Soon after they started seeing each other, they went on a double date with Jonathan’s friends, Jacob and Emily. The couples met up at a Chinese restaurant and Brenda barely spoke. It wasn’t a huge deal at first because Jacob and Emily believed she was just shy or nervous, but they learned the real story later. Jonathan confessed that, “She was doing that because she didn’t like the fact that Emily hugged Jonathan.” She was upset that he hugged his friend. This wasn’t the only time that Brenda’s jealousy was showing during the three months they dated. She brought up this hug between him and Emily everytime they fought. Jonathan told his mom how jealous Brenda was and he explained that she had a really rough childhood and his mom said that he should give her time. “Eventually, she’ll see what a good guy you are, and she’ll see she can trust you.” Pam did say that she absolutely didn’t know how extreme the jealousy was, Jonathan didn’t give her the whole story. If she had known how bad things where, she would have told him to run.
For Christmas that year, the Crews family took a trip to Germany. Keep in mind, they had only been dating for a month at this point. Jonathan was enjoying a nice vacation with his family and he sent Brenda some photos and videos, she responded with questions about that hug from Emily and questioned him about the women who liked his Facebook posts. They argued over text messages for the next several nights and around 3 AM on Christmas morning, they almost broke up, but the messages show that by 5 AM, he had reassured Brenda that he truly loved her.
In January of 2014, a few weeks prior to Jonathan’s death, he and Brenda got in a long argument about one of his ex-girlfriends and the fight lasted for days, both online and in person. He always stayed friends with his exes, but he promised to break off contact with his ex to end this fight. They didn’t stop fighting though. On February 1st, one day before he died, Jonathan confessed to his sister Dani that he felt like Brenda was trying to make him choose between having a relationship with her or keeping his friendship with Emily. He sent several texts to his sister and said that he basically had four choices at this point:
He told Dani that the first three options “all hold a strong likelihood of ending the relationship.” After talking it through, he decided that he wanted to break up with Brenda on his own term which “limits/contains the damage.”
On the morning of February 2nd, Jonathan sent his friend Jacob a text and asked if he wanted to get something to eat. Jacob and Emily went to see Jonathan’s new apartment and they noticed that he didn’t have much furnitue and the place was surprisingly clean. He was the messy roommate, so that’s not what they were expecting.
Jacob had also grown up around guns, so Jonathan wanted to show him his two new ones. The new SIG Sauer was the gun that was later used to end Jonathan’s life and it was stored in its own space in his dresser and the magazine was in and a round was chambered, so it was ready to go. Jonathan was a competitive shooter, and he took gun safety extremely seriously.
The three friends went to lunch at Anamia’s Tex-Mex, one of Jonathan’s favorite restaurants and Jacob said, “Looking back on it, he was alittle awkard because he was afraid Brenda might find out that Emily was with us.” As the food arrived, Brenda called and Jacob said, “He was visibly nervous when he got the call. He knew Emily was there, and he knew what Brenda was gonna say.” He talked quietly to Brenda, then he handed the phone to Emily and said Brenda wanted to talk to her.
Jacob said, “My wife has a bit of an attitude. She can be a bit of a boss lady. She doesn’t let people run over her. But when she got off the phone, she ran to the bathroom crying. I was kind of shocked.” Emily said she tried to stay composed, but Brenda was screaming at her on the phone. She said, “I tried to say we’re just friends. When she met me, Jacob was there! She just kept telling me I was a disrespectful little girl, and I better stay away from her man and stop hugging him.” The call really changed the vibe of things, so everyone packed up their food and left. Jonathan was super embarrassed and apologized to Emily. Before they left, he said, “That’s it. I’m going home and packing her bag.” He stopped taking calls from Brenda after she yelled at Emily, and she was getting pretty upset.
The three of them went back to the apartment and that’s when Emily and Jacob invited Jonathan to the Super Bowl party. They said it would be good for him to forget about his relationship problems for a while, but he had so much to get done, so he declined. Around 2 PM, he hugged Jacob and Emily, and they told Jonathan they loved him. At 10:52 PM, Emily received a text from Jonathan’s phone that read, “I want to die.” Emily said, “That’s not the way Jonathan texted. He’d send long messages or a bunch of messages, one after the other. Not just one short one.” Roughly 40 minutes after this text was sent, Brenda called 911 to report the shooting which is where our story began. When Emily woke up the next morning, she still hadn’t received a response from Jonathan after he sent her that text, so she called, and he didn’t answer. She had a bad feeling, so she was driving over to his apartment, but she got a call from her boyfriend and learned that Jonathan was dead.
As you can imagine, the night Jonathan died was chaotic and confusing for his family after they received the news. Some people from the church went over to their house to sit with them and it was late into the night when they finally fell asleep. Pam hadn’t been asleep for long when the phone rang and it was Henry Su, the owner of the Kung fu school where Brenda worked. He told Pam that he had just driven Brenda home from the police station and they were talking about what happened......he asked Pam, do you want to hear it?
Brenda said she had gone to Jonathan’s apartment that afternoon and they fought off and on all evening. He told her to cover her ears and he shot himself. Henry said that Brenda told him she was in the living room when Jonathan shot himself, but if you recall, she told the police that she was at the foot of his bed when it happened. Henry later denied saying that she was in the living room, but Pam said she knew what she heard, and this didn’t make sense to her.
The next morning, Brenda showed up to the Crews family home and she mourned with them. Pam says, “I was probably taking care of her more than anyone.” Brenda stayed at their home and slept in Dani’s bed for the next three nights and Dani held her while she cried. Then one night Brenda slipped out of the home without saying goodbye.
The family had planned the funeral and expected to see Brenda at the viewing, but she never showed up. She sent Dani a Facebook message about the funeral, and she asked if she could wear jeans and she also wanted to know if the family would give her a ride there, but she never showed up to this either. They had saved a seat for her, up front, with the family and when she didn’t show up, they were actually concerned that she may have harmed herself. She later sent Dani a message and said she was upset that more wasn’t said at the funeral about her relationship with Jonathan.
Brenda sent a text, “Why is it that your parents keep telling me they love me and understand what happened, but they kept me completely out of this? Then never mentioned how happy he was with me, or anything related with me. They included his best friends, but not me.”
Jonathan’s mom was pretty confused about this and she said, “They had been dating for three months. That’s not the kind of thing you talk about at a funeral.” At this point, she wasn’t suspicious of Brenda, she just thought she had odd behavior.
After the funeral, the Crews family decided to change Jonathan’s Facebook to a memorial page, but they realized they couldn't access it. They asked Brenda for the password, and she said that they had to promise not to add any of his ex-girlfriends to the page. She said they had a discussion and decided to remove his exes and it’s his wishes.
Jonathan’s friends were still baffled by the text message that came from his phone saying I want to die, and they did not believe that he wrote it. Jacob was his roommate for a long time, and he said when Jonathan got stressed out, he would go sleep. He didn’t send cryptic text messages. About a week and a half after his death, his friends went to the Crews family home and showed the message to his mom and Pam immediately said, Jonathan didn’t write that. They told her about the weird lunch they had with Jonathan on the day of his death and told her about the phone call between Brenda and Emily. Pam said, “I didn’t realize until then that she had a motive, too.”
Jonathan’s parents went to the Coppel police and told them they had witnesses who could verify that their son was planning on breaking up with Brenda on the night he died. The detectives told them that they believed Brenda was responsible for his death and they anticipated an arrest would happen soon, but they needed the family to be patient and to try to act natural when they interacted with her at the kung fu school.
The police did investiagate the crime scene as a possible murder, even though Brenda told them it was a suicide. They secured paper bags over Jonathan’s hands and photographed the apartment. They ran tests for gunpowder residue and interviewed Brenda for hours that night and they questioned her repeatedly after that. The Dallas County medical examinder found that Jonathan did not have drugs or alcohol in his system and listed the cause of death as “undetermined.”
The family waited for months and every time Brenda didn’t show up at kung fu, they thougth this could be the day, maybe they arrested her. Pam tried to ignore Brenda at Wu Yi, but after a few months went by, she changed her tactics. She tried to pay attention to her. She watched and listened to everything, hoping Brenda would slip up and she could crack the case. At one point, Pam sent an email to Brenda, asking her what happened on the night her son died. Brenda explained that Jonathan had been really down for about three days before his death and he had been afraid of losing her. They were fighting, but she thought things were fixed and they started watching TV, then ordered some food. In one email Brenda wrote, “We talked about how many kids we wanted to have and when. We talked about our plans and how happy we were with each other.”
She said that later that night, he brought the argument back up and she went to the bathroom. When she came out, she sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed and was checking her phone. She said that Jonathan said a lot of nice and sweet things to her, then told her to cover her ears. Pam asked Brenda what his last words were and Brenda said he told her, “Baby, I love you so much. You are my world, and I will prove it to you.”
Brenda said she ran to him and pressed on his chest as hard as she could to stop the bleeding. She said that during his last moments alive, “I was just looking at Jonathan because he was trying to say something and reach my hand. I couldn’t hold his hand because I was holding the phone with one hand and pressing on his chest with the other one. But he was looking at me very scared. I told him I love him and asked him not to leave me.”
Pam barely communicated with Brenda after receiving these responses and a few months later, the case was reassigned to different detectives. They told Pam that the case was solvable. She said, “They asked us to give them six weeks to review all the evidence. I was very hopeful again.” Unfortunately, the new detectives reached the same conclusion as the previous ones. There just wasn’t enough evidence to proceed. As the second anniversary of Jonathan’s death grew closer, Pam and John started talking about filing a civil suit against Brenda for wrongful death. They hoped this would give them a chance to look for more evidence. Pam said, “It’s not like we wanted anything from her. We just wanted the truth to come out. She had all these fantastical stories and we wanted to get the story righted.”
They met with an attorney, but they were told that if they really wanted to get this case solved, they should hire a good private detective. That’s what lead them to Sheila Wysocki. When she was a student at SMU in the mid 80’s, her roommate was raped and murdered. The case went unsolved until, 20 years later, while Sheila was living in Nashville, Tennessee, as a stay-at-home mom, she had a vision of her roommate and decided to become an investigator. She started with background checks and cheating spouses and worked her way up to missing persons and murder cases. After she called the Dallas Police Department hundreds of times, her roommate’s case was reopened and the evidence was retested. The DNA matched a rapist who had been out on parole at the time of the murder. Sheila works with a network of experts on everything from speech patterns to handwriting analysis.
When she heard about the Crews story in 2015, she was intrigued by the case and a few details stuck out to her. Men who end their own lives are far more likely to shoot themselves in the head, not the chest. Brenda claimed Jonathan took his own life to prove his love for her, but that makes no sense. Sheila says she is very selective about which families she works with. “There’s a sound in the desperation in a mom’s voice. Pam had that. It says, you are my absolute last hope.” She told the family that this case was called in as a suicide. If she discovered that it truly was a suicide during the investigation, then it’s over. She would stop everything and tell the family very bluntly about her findings. She wanted to make sure they could handle the truth if that’s where the story led her.
Sheila agreed to take the case and she had the Crews family ask the Coppell police for Jonathan’s phone and computer. The phone screen was smashed, and its evidence envelope inidcated that it had been found between Jonathan’s mattress and box spring. The digital interactions in the weeks prior to his death did not indicate that he was depressed, but texts and Facebook messages showed just how often he and Brenda were fighting and how possessive she seemed to be. Three weeks before the shooting, Brenda asked Jonathan on Facebook what he would do if they lived together and got in a fight. He said, “I would sleep, just like I did tonight.”
Sheila started to put together a list of potential witnesses and she interviewed Jonathan’s neighbor, Stephanie Mitchell. She said she heard a gunshot that night about 20 minutes before she heard someone knocking on her door and she looked through the peephole and saw Brenda. This neighbor has given two different accounts though. In one statement, she believed she heard the gunshot 20 minutes before Brenda was at the door, but in another statement, she thought it was 45 minutes. Sheila spoke to the manager of the Chinese food restaurant that Jonathan had ordered from the night he died. The manager said the driver overheard a fight when they delivered the food and they had to knock several times before the door opened. The fight was so loud, he could hear it in the hallway.
Brenda’s ex-boyfriend, Matthew Kirk, this was the guy she dated for four years and he said that Brenda was regularly cutting herself during their relationship. She had also pulled out her hair and slammed her own head against the wall. He wasn’t allowed to even be in an elevator alone with another woman. He said she was “very jealous and insecure.” and “got crazy whenever I went around any girl.” This included his sister-in-law. He said Brenda didn’t even want him to go to the hospital on the day that his niece was born. He decided to go the hospital anyways and when he got home, Brenda was crying in the bathroom and her hand was full of blood. She had broken the mirror in the bathroom and used the shards to cut her wrists. Matthew said he and Brenda got into a pretty heated fight when he tried to break up with her and she grabbed a pair of scissors and threatened to kill his mother. So, she hopped in her car and sped off towards his mother’s house and he went chasing after her and called the police and she ended up being taken to the hospital. After they dated for more than 4 years, she broke up with him via text. He said, “That girl ruined me and the relationship between me and my family.”
On the morning after Jonathan was shot, Matthew said that Brenda showed up at his house and it was the first itme he had seen her in months. She was crying and repeatedly asked him, “Would you do anything for me?” He said yes and she asked him to shoot her. He said no, and she asked him to give her a gun so she could shoot herself. Matthew says that Brenda told him that her boyfriend had been playing with a gun and accidentally shot himself in the head.
Sheila met with Brenda’s best friend, Karen Petree, at the school where she taught. Karen ended the interview when she realized Sheila wasn’t a cop, but she later testified that she had gone camping with Brenda a few weeks after the shooting and Brenda never mentioned Jonathan. She also testified that Brenda told her she’d had an abortion the summer before the relationship with Jonathan began, and that the owner of the kung fu school, Henry Su, offered to pay for it. Henry denies this.
Sheila wanted to know more about Henry and his kung fu school, so she decided to go undercover. She went to the school and told them she was involved in a nonprofit that worked with the victims of violent crime and she was looking for a martial arts school in Texas where she could send people for emotional and physical guidance. She went to the school several times to speak with instructors and students about kung fu, then she signed herself up for the tai chi class. After class one night, she went to dinner with a small group of people, including Henry. Sheila was very surprised to hear that people kept referring to themselves as “The Family.” It reminded her of a cult and she noticed that people would physically surround Brenda during breaks as if they were protecting her.
The Crews family requested all of the police documents, including the initial incident report, the autopsy report, and the gunpowder residue tests. Using this, combined with photos from the crime scene, Sheila put together a video showing the trajectory of the bullet, from the left side of Jonathan’s chest to the right side of his back. She used computer animation that shows how difficult it would have been for Jonathan, who was right-handed, to pull the trigger, and another animation showing what it would look like if Brenda were the shooter. The heavy blowback or “kick” created by the SIG Sauer was strong enough, in theory, to at least knock the gun off the bed if Jonathan shot himself.
According to the gunpowder residue report, Jonathan had residue on the tops of a few fingers on his right hand, but none on his right palm and none on his left hand. Brenda had residue on both sides of both hands and on her sweatshirt. No report mentions fingerprints on the gun or its magazine. Reports and photos from the night of the shooting show that when the police arrived, the magazine was found out of the gun, in Jonathan’s tie drawer and this is not where his friend Jacob had seen it when he saw the gun a few hours earlier that day. Jacob says that Jonathan was really into fashion. “His ties were all carefully rolled, each one, to make sure they didn’t get wrinkled. He wouldn’t have put something with oil and lubricant on top of hundreds of dollars worth of ties.” Jonathan loved his tie collection and he was very meticulous about his clothing.
It’s not known if the magazine was removed before or after Jonathan was shot, but it’s possible that whoever pulled the trigger, didn’t know there was a round in the chamber. An investigation narrative generated from the medical examiner’s office the morning after the shooting saying that Jonathan had a history of depression and that he “was supposed to be taking anti-depression medication but was non-compliant.” It’s unclear where this information originated, but it did not come from the Crews family. Sheila and Pam requested Jonathan’s medical records and there was no mention of depression or prescriptions for antidepressants. There was a file showing that just days before he died, he had an injury to his right shoulder, meaning, it would have been very difficult to fire the gun with his right hand, which was the only one with gunpower residue on it.
After reviewing everything, the private investigator, Sheila, developed a theory. She believed that Jonathan did tell Brenda he wanted to break up and they got into a fight. They got into bed and went to sleep, just like he said he would do if they fought. Jonathan went to sleep, then Brenda sent the text message from his phone to Emily, then smashed it. She thinks that Brenda grabbed Jonathan’s gun, aimed it at his heart and pulled the trigger. The sound of the cocked gun may have woken up Jonathan and he may have grabbed the gun with his right hand, which explains how the gunpower residue got on that hand. Brenda ejected the magazine and hid it in the tie drawer, then waited a few minutes before calling 911. Then she was intentionally slow to ask neighbors for the address because she wanted to make sure he was dead before anyone arrived.
One of the major problems with this theory is that she believes Brenda waited until Jonathan died before calling for help, but it’s been argued that he was potentially alive during the 911 call. It’s believed that a man can be heard moaning in the background and the sound occurs 50 seconds into the call and again at the 2:50 mark. There was also a dog in the apartment though, so it’s possible that the dog was making a noise in the living room that could be heard. They did play a clip of this audio in the Dateline episode, and I have no idea what I was hearing, but it didn’t necessarily sound like a man moaning to me.
Sheila put together a file and went to the Coppell Police Department, but she says they were not interested in anything she had to show them. A spokesperson for the Coppell police says the case is open, but not active. Pam Crews says the entire experience with the Coppell police has left her feeling confused. “I want to think well of the police, so I don’t know what to think. I’m normally a person who is very much pro-police. I think they get a bad shake and I don’t want to add to that. I’d like to think it’s a bunch of good people held back by budgetary restraints. I’d be real sad to think that I’m wrong.”
Brenda Lazaro got married and had a baby. She and her husband, Jason Kelly, both attend Wu Yi. Jonathan’s mom and sister still participate in kung fu demonstrations, but they go to a different school now. Brenda’s friends from the school, including Henry Su, do not believe she is capable of murder. Her ex-boyfriend also says he doesn’t think she could shoot someone. He said, “I think she’s more of a talker than a doer.” Brenda’s attorney says she categorically denies any accusation of wrongdoing and has not wavered in her story.
A retired Houston police homicide detective testified that he is confident Jonathan Crews didn’t shoot himself based on several factors, including his right-handedness, a recent shoulder injury, the orientation of the “muzzle stamp” on his body and the direction the bullet traveled. Darrell Robertson said, “It defies common sense that he would do that as his last act.” He explained that Jonathan would have endured shoulder pain in order to aim the gun at the spot where he was shot because he had that recent shoulder injury.
The Crews family filed a civil lawsuit against Brenda, alleging that she shot him to death in a jealous rage. On the 911 call, they showed how Brenda couldn’t seem to remember the address, yet she helped Jonathan pick out the location of the apartment and she worked across the street. You could argue that she is familiar with the area, but she also could have been flustered enough to forget. Or, was she stalling on purpose?
The gun powder residue was on Jonathan’s right hand. If he shot himself, it would have been with his right hand and the gun was shot at close range. If you look at the trajectory of the bullet and you believe Jonathan shot himself, he would have had to hold the gun in the most awkward way and I’ll try to explain it. I googled the terminology, so bear with me. The gun is in his right hand and the muzzle would be pointed at the left side of his chest. That means he is reaching his right arm across his chest and the gun is tilted on its side, so the grip is aimed to the left. When they showed this in the Dateline episode, they showed that his thumb would be on the trigger. A SIG Sauer has a hard pull on the trigger, with his shoulder injury, he would have been in a lot of pain if he twisted that way. Jonathan was well-educated in guns and as morbid as this sounds, he would know how to put the gun to his head or his mouth to make sure he got the job done, if that was his intention.
There is a theory that Jonathan didn’t know there was a bullet in the chamber and this was all a tragic mistake, he didn’t really mean to end his life. If this is the case, I would find it extra strange that Brenda’s story has changed so many times. She told her ex-boyfriend that Jonathan shot himself in his head, but he was shot in the left side of his chest. She told some of her friends that she was at the foot of the bed when he shot himself, but she told others that she was in the bathroom when it happened. If she was at the foot of the bed or in the bathroom, how did she get gun powder residue on both hands and on her shirt?
To be clear, Jonathan’s death has not been ruled a homicide and Brenda has not been charged. She pleaded the 5th about 130 to 140 times during the civil trial, so she didn’t answer anything. The jurors attempted to recreate the trajectory of the bullet and they did not believe there was any possible way Jonathan could have shot himself, even as an accident. In a civil case, you only need the jurors to believe that it’s likely that Brenda was responsible. It doesn’t work the same as a criminal case, but the jurors said they believe the evidence was so strong that Brenda was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The jurors felt that this should have moved forward as a criminal case.
After a 3 day civil trial in 2022, the jurors deliberated for less than three hours and Brenda was found responsible for Jonathan’s death and the Crews family was awarded $206 million dollars in damages because of the jury’s final conclusion. The verdict is mainly symbolic, it’s not likely that the family will actually get much money from Brenda. The verdict provides some validation for the family and backs up their suspicion that she may be responsible for Jonathan’s death. The Crews family’s private investigator, Sheila Wysocki said, “This was never about money. This has always been about telling the story of what happened to Jonathan.”
5 months after the verdict, the family was told there was insufficient evidence to proceed with criminal charges. This is based on where the bullet ended up. When the police were processing the scene and looking for the bullet, they disassembled Jonathan’s bed, so the bullet could have rolled around.
The first officer on scene picked up the gun and moved it away from Jonathan’s body, so there isn’t any photos to prove where it was. He moved it from the bedroom to the kitchen.
Also, the police waited 6 months to test the gun and by that time, it had been sent to the lab and swabbed for DNA, which wiped away the prints. They found unknown DNA on the gun in addition to Jonathan’s DNA. The police never got Brenda’s DNA. A DNA sample that was labeled with her name was sent to the lab, but it was actually a sample of Jonathan’s blood from her hands.
Jonathan’s parents, Pam and John say they will never give up fighting for answers about their son’s death and they also want people to remember how he lived. Their big hearted, goofy son. The doting big brother and best friend who brought laughter into all their lives and loved every minute of it. He was excited about life and enjoyed every day.
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