SHIPPENVILLE, Pa. (EYT) – A Clarion County jury of seven women and five men found Jeremy Dailey guilty of the murder of 74-year-old Thomas Kemmer after an hour of deliberation.
Dailey was convicted of criminal homicide, burglary, criminal trespass, and two counts of aggravated assault.
Both the defense and the prosecution agreed that Dailey killed Kemmer in the early morning hours of January 29, 2023, by shooting him in the face five times inside the Limestone Township home he shared with his wife, Susan, after Dailey was discovered naked and talking to himself on the Kemmer’s front porch.
The victim, looking to help the distressed man, opened the door to him against his wife’s wishes. About seven minutes later, he was dead.
The prosecution argued during the trial it was a case of cold-blooded murder. The defense’s position was that Dailey had suffered a psychotic break and was not responsible for his actions because of legal insanity.
The fifth day of the trial began with a closing statement by Clarion County Chief Public Defender Jacob Roberts. Roberts began his hour-long statement to the jury by thanking them for their service to the community and told them the only reasonable conclusion they could come to after listening to four days of testimony is that Jeremy Dailey suffered a psychotic breakdown related to his schizophrenic condition, which constituted legal insanity.
Roberts continued his argument by walking the jury through the testimony of Dr. Sara G. West, a forensic psychiatrist, who said Dailey exhibited all five criteria of a schizophrenic break.
He asked the jury to apply common sense while they were deliberating.
The jury faced four possible verdicts for each count against Dailey: guilty, not guilty, guilty but mentally ill, and not guilty by reason of legal insanity.
Dailey had a long history of mental illness, starting in 1993, continuing through 1998 when he was discharged from the Marine Corps because of psychotic conditions, and into 2001 when he was first diagnosed with schizophrenia at a Veterans Administration Hospital. Following that diagnosis, Dailey applied for and received disability income from the Social Security Administration because of his mental health diagnoses.
Roberts told the jury three separate healthcare professionals diagnosed his client with schizophrenia while he was incarcerated in the Clarion County Jail awaiting trial, including Dr. West. It was only after 16 months of treatment, he said, that the prosecution’s expert witness, Philadelphia Psychiatrist John O’Brien II, MD, said Dailey was not schizophrenic, but autistic.
Attorney Roberts walked the jury through the day before Kemmer’s killing, pointing out the schizophrenic behavior his client was exhibiting, starting in the early afternoon as he was traveling to Chillicothe, Ohio, with his step-brother and step-sister-in-law to attend the birthday party for his step-mother. Chillicothe was where Dailey was raised in a strict religious setting and a place the defense argued was triggering to him because of the religious upbringing and abuse he suffered at the hands of his step-father.
According to the defense, Dailey had no motive to murder Kemmer, and pointed out the prosecution never established a motive. He further argued that Dailey was not using mind-altering drugs, as the prosecution theorized, pointing to a lack of any illicit drug found in his system by the state’s contracted forensic laboratory, NMS Labs.
NMS Labs only found caffeine in Dailey’s blood after performing an expanded drug panel at the request of the State Police.
District Attorney Drew Welsh spent a significantly longer amount of time addressing the jury in his closing statement, arguing the defense told the jury a story that is not supported by the facts.
Using an animation of the prosecution’s theory of what happened the night Kemmer died, intermingled with 9-1-1 audio, Welsh argued Dailey acted deliberately over the course of several minutes while inside the Kemmer’s home. He said there were three separate assaults on Thomas Kemmer, culminating in Dailey executing Kemmer as he sat in a chair in his living room. After the murder, he argued, Dailey dressed himself and attempted to flee the scene, only failing when two State Police troopers confronted him during his escape.
Welsh told the jury the insanity defense raised by Attorney Roberts meant the burden was on the defense to show that Dailey was legally insane at the time of the murder, something they failed to do.
After his two-hour and ten-minute argument, Welsh asked the jury to find Dailey guilty on all counts.
After a recess for lunch, Clarion County President Judge Sara Seidle-Patton read the jury a set of state-mandated instructions, which lasted an hour and twenty minutes. Following the instructions, the jury was sent in to deliberate.
After 30 minutes, the jury notified the court that they had a question about the verdict option of guilty but mentally ill. Court reconvened for about five minutes, during which Judge Seidle-Patton reread the instructions regarding that verdict and sent them back to deliberate. Twenty-five minutes later, the court announced a verdict had been reached.
Dailey was found guilty of criminal homicide, burglary (overnight accommodations with a person present, bodily injury crime), aggravated assault (attempts to cause serious bodily injury or causes injury with extreme indifference), aggravated assault (attempts to cause bodily injury with a deadly weapon), and criminal trespassing (break into structure).
After the court was adjourned at 6:30 p.m., District Attorney Welsh expressed gratitude to the jury for their service and praised the strength of Kemmer’s family who had attended every day of the trial.
When asked whether he believed Dailey was faking his mental illness, Welsh responded, “To me, it wasn’t about whether he was faking or not, it was what caused his recent bizarre behavior.”
Attorney Roberts indicated that an appeal would be forthcoming.
“I believe the expert testimony spoke for itself,” Roberts said.
After the jury was dismissed and court adjourned, the Kemmer family could be seen hugging and crying in the courtroom.
Only one member of Dailey’s family was present in the courtroom at the end of the proceedings, having missed the reading of the verdict.
Dailey will be sentenced at a later date following a pre-sentencing investigation.