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A fight between two out-of-state construction workers turned fatal Friday night, as one eventually ended up in a motel trash bin and the other in the local jail.
The body of Benjamin Carrigan, 23, of North Carolina was found Saturday morning in a trash bin beside the Twi-Lite Motel on the U.S. 1 Bypass. Autopsy results aren't complete, but police suspect he suffered some head trauma, city police spokesman Jim Shelhorse said yesterday.
The victim apparently took quite a beating, according to Jocko Parker and Tanya Davis, motel residents who also clean the facility's 19 rooms.
"I think his legs were broken, and his neck was broken, and all kinds of stuff like that," Parker said.
Early yesterday morning, city police charged James Jaspers, 33, of Michigan with first-degree murder. He was being held yesterday in the Rappahannock Regional Jail.
The slaying is the city's first homicide of 2004.
The victim and suspect probably met when they served time together in a North Carolina prison, Shelhorse said. He doesn't know if they were released at the same time, but said they had been doing construction work in the Fredericksburg area.
Carrigan was staying in Room 1 at the Twi-Lite. Other guests heard what they described as a loud, drunken brawl about 11:30 Friday night.
"But it was all over by midnight, which surprised me," said a woman from Washington, who asked not to be identified. She expected the "partying" in Room 1 to go on for hours.
Instead, all was quiet until about 8:50 Saturday morning. That's when Cornelius Baylor, 27, of Fredericksburg came by the motel. He had just finished his newspaper delivery route, and he backed his car up to the trash bin to throw out extra papers, like he does every morning.
He noticed a strong odor.
"I never smelled nothing like that," he said. "I thought it might be a dog in there--and then I saw a foot."
The body was on top of the trash heap with a piece of a table placed over it, he said. At first, Baylor thought it was a mannequin, then looked a second time to see if the man was breathing.
He went to the room where his girlfriend's family is staying.
By then, Baylor "looked like he was in shock," said Thelma Brown, his girlfriend's mother. "He was really shook up."
Baylor comes by the motel daily to pick up Brown and take her to work at the Central Park McDonald's. Brown's daughters, Teena and Janice, also work there, and Teena Brown is Baylor's girlfriend.
But no one was able to work on Saturday, after their early morning experience. "There's no way we would have been able to function," Thelma Brown said. "That was all any of us could think about."
As the police arrived and a crowd gathered outside the motel, the Browns noticed a strange-acting man. He asked what had happened and ran across the U.S. 1 Bypass, to a van parked at the College Heights McDonald's, when he was told a man had been murdered.
Another daughter, Tracy Brown, 22, has seen enough episodes of television's "Law & Order" to know suspicious activity when she sees it. She got out her Sprint camera-phone and started taking photographs, of both the man and the license tags of the van.
Police downloaded her photos and later tracked down the vehicle, Shelhorse said. The suspect wasn't in it, but police were able to put together "some more pieces of the puzzle," he said.
"You never know what little piece of information is going to make a difference," he said.
An even bigger break came Saturday night, when police were investigating a complaint off Fall Hill Avenue, near the Rappahannock River. Shelhorse said there was "a homeless encampment" there, and officers arrested several people for trespassing.
That's when they heard about a stranger in the camp, he said. The man the camp's residents were talking about had been staying at the Twi-Lite Motel, but had suddenly moved to the homeless camp.
Police went back to the Fall Hill Avenue site at 3 a.m. yesterday and arrested Jaspers.
Saturday's grisly discovery wasn't the first time unusual things have happened at the motel. The badly decomposed body of a man was found inside a car, parked behind the building, in August 1989. A Richmond woman--a probable suicide--was found dead there in May 1991.
In September 1989, rescue workers responded to a call about a sick woman at Twi-Lite and discovered the cause of her indigestion: a 4-pound, 14-ounce baby girl.
The child was born in the hotel room, to her 33-year-old mother and 79-year-old father.
Then, in 1996, a man set off a stick of dynamite at the motel and chased anyone who came near him with a machete.
Cornelius Baylor hopes he'll never be involved with an incident like the one he experienced Saturday at Twi-Lite. He still can't get the image of the dead body out of his mind.
"When you see something like that, it just sticks in your head," he said.
To reach CATHY DYSON: 540/374-5425 cdyson@freelancestar.com