Officers of the Court (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Long ago I worked with a reporter who routinely suggested potential news stories without any idea of whether they were factual. His setup — “Wouldn’t it be a great story if …” — became a newsroom punchline. I have no reason to believe that he actually fabricated any articles, but his approach to journalism made me nervous. I have never known another reporter who did that.

I was reminded of that dude as I edited Senior Editor Mark Friedman’s two-part story about the 2015 death of 20-year-old Luke Baker in a Jefferson County hunting lodge and the misery and litigation that trailed in its wake. (See Lawyers Called Greedy in Fatal Gunplay Case and Private Autopsy, Public Blowback in Fatal Gunplay Case.)

As the mother of two grown sons, I appreciate the misery that his parents will live with for the rest of their lives. I can even understand their refusal to believe that their boy, raised to respect firearms, would ever have shot himself in the head in the reckless stunt described by his friend and only known witness.

And since they can’t believe that Luke shot himself, I can understand why they believed that someone else did it — someone who has not been held accountable. I can understand their unquenchable desire to find evidence that someone else’s kid was reckless, or even malicious.

What I can’t understand is why lawyers, officers of the court, helped the Baker family accuse others — specifically Skylar Wilson; his father, Bryan Adams; and his uncle, Brandon Adams — of causing and then covering up Luke’s death without evidence beyond the desperate belief of a bereaved family. It would be great for the Baker family if anyone who had firsthand experience with the evidence — including the body exhumed years after burial — had offered any support for the idea of a homicide, or at least some evidence contradicting young Skylar’s account.

But no one did — not sheriff’s department investigators, not the deputy coroner, not even the medical examiner hired to perform a long-delayed autopsy or the former coroner hired to witness the autopsy.

That didn’t stop attorney Greg Stephens, a longtime friend of Luke’s father, Kerry Baker, from asserting in court that the gunshot was “believed” to have originated too far from the wound to have been self-inflicted. Believed by whom? Only by those with a vested interest in believing it.

For two and a half years, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Alex Guynn demonstrated compassion toward the Bakers and gave their lawyers more latitude than they probably deserved. Ultimately, he lost patience with “theatrics” and dismissed the Bakers’ attempt to use a civil court to reassign the blame for their son’s death.

And while he never directly questioned the family’s motives, Guynn did suggest that Stephens and another of the Baker family’s lawyers, Lucien Gillham of Benton, were motivated by greed rather than justice. Well, he was elected to be the judge of such things.

After spending more than $1 million defending themselves, the Adams brothers and Wilson have turned the table. They have sued the Bakers, the lawyers and even the Jefferson County coroner, who waited almost four years to declare Luke’s wound to be “non-self-inflicted” based on what he later described as a “mistake” in interpreting photos of a body he had never seen in person. Coroner Chad Kelley could have put a stop to a narrative that had no supporting evidence, but he didn’t. While I can’t endorse the sinister motive that the Adamses ascribe to Kelley — that he changed the cause of death in order to get a cheap settlement in an unrelated sexual harassment lawsuit — I think it’s fair to say that the people of Jefferson County deserve a coroner who can recognize evidence of a close-contact gunshot wound. And one who doesn’t average five phone calls a week with a single plaintiff’s attorney (Stephens) over the course of two years.

Mark Friedman spent weeks reporting on the most complicated legal morass that he or I or Managing Editor Jan Cottingham had ever seen. As Jan pointed out, that’s well over 100 years of combined journalistic experience.

But as complicated as the legalities are, I think the most telling detail is quite simple. Skylar Wilson said his friend Luke joked about playing Russian roulette, then pointed a revolver at the ceiling of the hunting lodge and pulled the trigger. But the gun failed to fire. Only then did Luke, laughing, point the gun at his own head.

If true, it explains why a young man with no desire to harm himself pulled that trigger the second time. If it’s not true, it’s the most brilliant, simple, believable lie I’ve ever heard.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.