Law enforcement's mishandling of a 2022 murder case in Harrisonburg led to a state police investigation of local officers' actions, multiple lawsuits against the agencies and officials involved, and the persistent question of whether some of those responsible for killing a young man have yet to face justice. Please be aware that this story contains graphic details of the murder and crime scene. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
[sounds of birds, traffic, rainstorm]
Eastover Drive, Harrisonburg – a semi-secluded spot where a small creek passes under Interstate 81. A scrap of grass and woods is sandwiched between residential neighborhoods, a shopping center, and the James Madison University campus.
In August of 2022, 26-year-old Towan Cappell was beaten to death, and his body was found here by a stream restoration crew after days of heat and rain.
One man is behind bars for this crime. But police negligence has left open the question of whether others participated in the murder who could have been or still may be caught. It exposed Cappell's family to trauma better suited to a horror movie than real life. It invited scrutiny from the Virginia State Police. And it spurred a mother's ongoing fight for justice, or at least vindication, against steep legal odds.
Christina Moore grew up in Harrisonburg, and raised her three kids here. Towan Cappell was the oldest.
CHRISTINA MOORE: Energetic. A risk-taker. Exciting. … His smile is what, really, would get you. The smile that he gave … I did the best I could with him. He would rebel, because he's very – "I'm going to do this to the beat of my own drum. I don't care if you're my parent, I don't care who you are." He did win a spelling bee one time in elementary school, though!
She last saw him, age 26, on August 13, 2022. He was at her house, they talked, and he walked out the door.
MOORE: I was worried, but I wasn't too worried until I reached out to text him and he was not answering … so I started getting a bad feeling.
Moore filed a missing person's report with the Harrisonburg Police Department three days later, and told an officer she feared he could be hurt or might have overdosed – Cappell struggled with substance use. She said officers made disrespectful comments to her then and throughout the investigation.
According to their own testimony, when officers responded to a call about a body found on Eastover Drive, they knew Cappell had been reported missing, and they could tell some of the tattoos on the body matched his jail records. But his face was unrecognizable due to injuries and decomposition. On the 19th, six days after Moore last saw him, officers collected a DNA sample from her, and either that or fingerprints were used to identify Cappell.
The crime scene
The following day, authorities allowed Moore and a few family members and friends – including Chris Botts, Cappell's godmother – to go to the crime scene. This is when an already horrible tragedy got unspeakably worse.
MOORE: As soon as I get on the scene, I look down and see his front teeth. So right then that puts me in a whole utter – "what's going on here? Why am I picking up my son's front teeth!?" And I know – and I know they're my son's front teeth because I know what they look like…. So they gathered the evidence and I said, "well you need to bring the dogs out here. You need to re-search this area." And one of the officers was like, "this is not TV."
CHRIS BOTTS: Mhmm.
HAGI: So you were there and you heard that comment, too?
BOTTS: Correct.
MOORE: "This is not TV." … So one of the officers reassured me that a whole different officer would come out the next week … to re-search the area and check for more evidence.
But, according to officers' testimony and a state police review of their investigation, the scene was not searched again or even secured for the next nine days. Moore went back on the 29th and this nightmare scenario was repeated.
MOORE: We get there. I found his jaw, three single teeth and more hair. … So, by that time I'm livid. I did call the cops, I did call the officer and I said a few choice words that aren't very nice. … "Come collect this evidence." From then on is just more of a state of shock.
Investigative failures
BRADLEY MATTHIAS: This is the first, like, murder, violent, serious violent crime that I worked.
That's the voice of Detective Bradley Matthias, recorded in an interview he did with Virginia State Police senior special agents tasked with reviewing the Harrisonburg Police Department's investigation. While the state agency denied my request for their records in this case, they did release them to Moore, who shared them with me.
As Matthias puts it, he was made lead investigator of the case because he was the first HPD officer on the scene.
MATTHIAS: I felt that it was very clear that I'd never worked a homicide, I'd only been up there for maybe two years at that point.
SENIOR SPECIAL AGENT HEATHER MARSHALL: … Do you remember if anybody went back to where he had been laying after he had been removed, just to double check in that general vicinity to see if anything had been left?
MATTHIAS: Not until the mother went out there.
MARSHALL: Because you can see on some of the photos, you can see his hair and his palate still there after y'all moved the body. I mean it's visible in the photo.
But even after the first time Moore found pieces of her son's remains –
MATTHIAS: Obviously, at that point, we're trying to do damage control.
MARSHALL: … But then, after that, y'all didn't go back out there?
MATTHIAS: I didn't know that – this sounds – I know there's a lot more now, that I know that will be done, I mean, any future cases, but it wasn't done.
A series of compounding errors came out in this interview and at trial. Besides leaving remains at the crime scene, officers did not keep required written records of their investigation; did not canvass the residents who lived near the scene; and did not initially divulge to Commonwealth's Attorney Marsha Garst that at least one of their witnesses was a paid confidential informant.
How was this allowed to happen?
MICHAEL PARKS: We did identify that there were some people in positions throughout the chain of this investigation that did not have as much experience as they could have.
Michael Parks, the city's director of communications and public engagement, was the only city employee who did an interview for this story.
PARKS: We were very disappointed, especially as we learned more about some of the failures that we identified in how this had been handled, not only from a procedures and policy standpoint, but just in general, how we were communicating with the family.
In Christina Moore's eyes –
MOORE: My son is Black, Puerto Rican. He went to prison. He was a felon. He did struggle with addiction. So I'm going to tell you right now, people in this town look at that like, "oh, we'll just let it go. Nobody cares about him, really. Let's just brush this under the rug." But they really forgot there are parents that care, and I'm one of them. … You are not going to pretend like my kid didn't matter. Because my kid mattered.
I asked Parks if Cappell's race, substance abuse issues, or criminal record influenced how officers handled the case.
PARKS: It would be outside of my experience with this police department in the seven years I've been here to see them treat a scene differently because of the person that was involved.
The one who was caught
The man who is incarcerated for Cappell's murder – Aaron Gordon Jr. – was caught burning his own clothes covered in Cappell's blood. Cell phone records and a witness place him and Cappell together the night of August 13th, 2022, driving back from Charlottesville and ending up in the Eastover Drive area. Gordon was initially charged with first-degree murder, but was convicted of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to the maximum of 10 years in prison.
Cappell's official cause and manner of death are undetermined. Medical Examiner Dr. Carmen Coles testified that decomposition prevented her from determining an exact sequence of events. A toxicology report showed some drugs in Cappell's system that he had partially metabolized. His injuries – inflicted by an unknown object – dislocated his facial bones from the rest of his skull. The technical term for these are "Le Fort fractures."
Dr. David Hunt, a forensic anthropologist, testified that these fractures are mostly associated with "car accidents when their face has gone through a windshield," and they are often not survivable, even with medical intervention.
Judge Andrew S. Baugher summed up the evidence simply in his remarks at sentencing: "his face was bashed in with a rock."
Cappell's body was found with his pants pockets pulled out and empty. Four DNA samples were isolated from the pockets – two matched Cappell and his brother, and the other two remain unknown to this day. They didn't match Gordon or eight other people tested, and they weren't run through a statewide DNA database because authorities had them processed by a private laboratory.
MOORE: I just don't believe the suspect that's arrested is the only suspect. He's not.
Gordon's defense attorney, Gene Hart, brought much of the investigation's procedural errors to light during the trial.
GENE HART: I can say that in my 32 years of practicing criminal law, I am confident that I've never seen a more confused and, in many ways, botched investigation, especially of the crime scene. That's probably about as much as I should say.
An assurance of consequences
Parks told WMRA that multiple officers were disciplined following an internal investigation conducted with the help of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, but he declined to give further details. Former Police Chief Kelley Warner resigned in 2024, before Gordon's trial, and is now the chief of the Solebury Police Department in Pennsylvania. She declined to be interviewed for this story.
PARKS: We know that we have erred, and because of that, this family has gone through additional trauma on top of what they were already going to have to go through, and that's unacceptable to us. That is something that we have pledged to make sure we do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The department has implemented some new policies to try and prevent these errors from being repeated – assigning at least two investigators to every homicide case and never leaving a scene until daylight.
Garst wrote a letter to the state police in October 2024, asking them to review the case "and if deemed necessary, complete said investigation." Garst told WMRA via email that she couldn't speak about the case, but it "is active to continue to hold anyone accountable for their roles" in it.
Another suspect
Gordon has another trial slated to begin in June, for allegedly strangling and attempting to murder a man in jail who had been on the witness list but hadn't actually testified in Cappell's case. According to a hearing transcript, he had told investigators about a connection between Gordon and another man police saw as a separate person of interest.
We'll refer to the person of interest by his nickname, T-Mac, as he hasn't been named an official suspect in Cappell's murder. State police records from July of last year note that their investigation remains open "pending federal charge updates" on T-Mac "and obtaining his DNA to compare to the case file." It's unclear why authorities don't already have his DNA based on Virginia law, as he was previously convicted of a felony, robbery, as a 17-year-old.
Just this April, T-Mac was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in federal prison, along with three co-conspirators, for selling narcotics. The Federal Bureau of Prisons collects DNA from inmates upon their arrival at a federal facility. According to the U.S. Marshals Service and online records, T-Mac was being held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail during the drug trafficking proceedings. Just in the last month, he was transferred to a federal prison in California, so a DNA sample from him could be on its way to Virginia.
Seeking justice for Towan
But so much has gone wrong with this investigation that Moore has lost faith in the criminal justice system to hold accountable everyone involved in her son's murder, or to make amends for how they conducted the investigation and treated her family.
MOORE: They act like this is spilt milk.
BOTTS: And it'll soon just dry.
Moore sued the Harrisonburg Police Department and several officers in federal court. The litigation was dismissed based on statutes of limitations. She has now petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear that case.
Moore is representing herself in court – drafting legal briefs, filing complaints and evidence, and arguing against experienced courtroom attorneys – all in a legal system that moves slowly and with unexplained delays.
She has also sued the city of Harrisonburg and various city leaders, the commonwealth's attorney, and the medical examiner in state court. Her suit against the city was dismissed in May, based on the legal immunity of government entities. The city's attorney, Brittany Shipley, said in the final hearing that Moore "just doesn't like what happened in the investigation and prosecution," but she did admit there had been "a failure of supervision" within the police department.
Judge Andrew S. Baugher presided over this lawsuit – he was the trial judge in the Gordon case, and remembered the details of Cappell's murder. Baugher told Moore he "can't even attempt to put myself in your shoes and what you went through," but he did have to dismiss the case based on the law.
The suit against the commonwealth's attorney was dismissed last summer, and while Moore filed an appeal the following month, the Court of Appeals of Virginia didn't actually receive it for over five months – only after Moore asked Rockingham County Circuit Court clerks in person about its status. That case is still working its way through the appellate court.
There were similar delays with Moore's suit against the medical examiner – she filed it in January 2025, and there was no movement in the case until last month, when the medical examiner asked the court to dismiss it because she was never served a summons. As of the airing of this story, Moore is still waiting on a hearing to be set in that case.
But she's not deterred.
MOORE: I will go to heaven, and knock on the door. I'm not stopping until I get to the top. When I say get to the top, I'm going to go to every court I can go to until you see what type of egregious, inhumane act this was.
As she calls on the courts for recognition and restitution, she wears a necklace engraved with Towan's portrait and name, and a locket holding some of his ashes – physical reminders of the son she will not allow to be dismissed or forgotten.
