A 33-year-old Chicago man is arrested in the shooting death of a father on Highway 169 in Plymouth.
“This was truly a needle in a haystack,” Plymouth police chief Erik Fadden said Thursday.
Jamal Lindsey Smith was taken into custody in Decatur, Ill., last week and will be extradited to Minnesota.
to face a second degree murder charge.
Jay Boughton of Crystal was fatally shot July 6 after coaching his son’s baseball game in what Fadden called “a traffic altercation.”
“There’s nothing that led us to believe that this was a back-and-forth road rage,” Fadden said. I know that term’s been used a few times. I have not used that term. I continue to not classify this as a road rage. It was really just a senseless act that happened in a brief moment when the two vehicles were next to each other.”
Fadden said nearly 400 tips and more than 1,500 hours of investigative work led to Smith on a “condensed timeline.”
“Eight weeks ago when I stood in front of you in this very room we really had some grainy traffic management camera footage and that’s all we had to go off of,” Fadden said. “Those first few days, we as staff spent hours in a room trying to figure out what kind of vehicle this was -- was it a Ford or a Chevy? -- and that’s really where we started. There were some tough days for all of our staff trying to figure out how we will get past even figuring what type of vehicle it was. It was a little discouraging early on.”
After he was shot, Boughton’s car went through a fence and crashed in a parking lot of an apartment complex on North Lancaster Lane. His 15-year-old son started CPR. Jay died at the hospital.
The car associated with Smith was located July 23, but police have not yet revealed, citing the ongoing investigation, how they went from video so grainy they could barely decipher the make and model to finding the car and arresting a suspect.
“The fact that our detectives and staff have put more than 1,500 hours into this case over the last eight weeks and there’s still a lot of work to be done, it says a lot about the amount of work that it took to get through this,” Fadden said.
Coordination with US Marshals and the local Decatur police department helped make the arrest without incident. It’s unknown when charges will be filed or when Smith will be extradited to Minnesota.
