A Minnesota man allegedly fatally shot his female co-worker after she repeatedly rebuffed his sexual advances at work, police said.
Early in the morning on 24 October, the body of Nicole Hammond, 28, was found in a St Cloud business parking lot, just metres away from where she was supposed to clock-in for work that day.
According to the criminal complaint, officers had arrived at the scene just before 7am after responding to a call from a witness who’d heard shots being fired on the 400 block of Lincoln Avenue in the small city.
When they arrived, they found the 28-year-old victim lying beside her car with what appeared to be a gunshot wound and pool of blood spilling out from below her head. Officers attempted life-saving measures on the young woman, but she was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.
Autopsy results from the coroner’s office revealed that she had been shot once on the right side of her neck, NBC News reported.
A witness later came forward and told police that they’d seen a co-worker of Hammond’s, Michael Jordan Carpenter, 36, leave his own car and approach the 28-year-old’s vehicle around the time of the shooting, KNSI Radio reported. That witness then claimed that Mr Carpenter fled the scene shortly after they’d heard the shots rip through the parking lot and jog back to his own car before leaving.
The St Cloud Police Department said in a release that they arrested Mr Carpenter at his residence at approximately 9.50am and he was taken into custody without incident.
When police searched the 36-year-old’s car, they recovered a 9mm pistol that still had a round inside the chamber and a loaded magazine in a carrying case on the driver’s side rear seat. The bullets found inside the recovered handgun matched the shell casing found near Hammond’s body, according to the filling, Fox 9 reported.
Under questioning, Mr Carpenter provided an unclear narrative about how the morning of 24 October had unfolded, with police noting that he made multiple contradictory statements.
At first, Mr Carpenter told authorities that he’d walked towards his co-worker’s car on that Monday morning but then heard a gunshot and saw that someone else was attending to her, the probable cause statement read.
Police pushed back on this version of events, however, as they pointed out in the filing that it would’ve been difficult to near impossible for Mr Carpenter to be able to have a clear line of sight at that hour and from his supposed position.
The 36-year-old suspect added in his statement that he did witness a lot of blood beside Hammond’s body but was reportedly “too traumatized” so he fled the scene without calling emergency responders or going into work that day.
At one point, Mr Carpenter claimed that he was aware that Hammond had not clocked into work that day at their shared place of employment, Dubow Textiles, a fact that he would not have been able to ascertain, police said, because he didn’t go into work that day nor clock-in himself.
Evidence uncovered from Hammond’s phone revealed that the pair of co-workers had been messaging in the days leading up to her untimely death, including a message sent by the 28-year-old the night before where she reportedly said, “did not want to be touched by the defendant, nor did she want to be manipulated by him,” the probable cause statement said.
Another message sent by Hammond to Mr Carpenter indicated that she’d asked him “to not make things uncomfortable at work,” the filing said.
Co-workers interviewed by authorities claimed that the 36-year-old defendant was known to have a bad temper, NBC News reported.
Executives at Dubow Textiles, however, were reportedly left caught off guard by the assault, as they claim they’d been unaware that Mr Carpenter had been harassing his younger colleague.
“We are very attuned to our staff’s needs, concerns and anytime that there is anything that requires our intervention, we step in,” said Hammond’s boss, Rob Dubow, chief executive at Dubow Textiles, in an interview with Fox 9 News. “But in this case, we had no indication that there was anything awry.”
Mr Carpenter acknowledged under questioning that he’d been left “upset” by the text conversation with his co-worker the night before her death, the filing said.
The 36-year-old was charged with second-degree murder and was booked into Benton County Jail, where he remains. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in jail.
