WABASH CO. – A convicted violent doper who has run into trouble repeatedly in Wabash and Richland counties since 2007 has found it again, this time in neighboring Gibson County in Indiana.
While authorities have been thus far reserved about the February 7 incident that continued on into the next day, sources have advised of the allegations surrounding it.
The drama began at about 3 p.m. when Marcus Adams, 28, now of Mt. Carmel but formerly of Bellmont, both in Wabash County, had a kind of freakout and is alleged to have battered his girlfriend and her son, and to have broken at least a couple of legs of the family dog.
Adams is reported to have called his girlfriend that afternoon, telling her he was in Owensville, Ind., and needed picked up. He had been missing for a few days, and prior to going absent, he’d reportedly absconded with a chunk of her paycheck.
The girlfriend took her father’s truck, a 2007 Ford F-150 4X4 off-road, and went to pick him up in Owensville.
However, when she arrived, Adams got into an altercation with her. He was accused of battering her and one of her children who were both with her, and at some point in time, the family pet, a dog, had its legs broken, although whether or not that happened at the scene in Owensville was not available in reports.
What was available was that Adams took off with the truck after snagging the keys away from the girlfriend, and left her and the children stranded in the cold in Owensville.
At that point, no one knew where he went or what he was doing, so a report of a stolen vehicle was made. It’s reported that police in Owensville didn’t take the report seriously, and would only list it as “missing.”
At 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 9, however, the vehicle was located in the vicinity of Illiana Carpet on Indiana State Road 64, not far from Duke Energy (the former Public Service Indiana, or PSI, as everyone still knows it) power plant, where Adams used to work.
Adams was subsequently located the next day in the vicinity of Mt. Carmel (whether it was in city limits or out remained unknown as of press time) and had been allegedly caught breaking into a woman’s house.
She didn’t want to file charges; instead, accompanied by Wabash County Deputy D-Ray Etzkorn, Adams was allowed to go back to Bellmont “gather his things” from the home he shared with the girlfriend.
Adams was taken to a relative in Mt. Carmel. But Adams, who is a felon dating back a decade ago, had not been charged in either Indiana or Illinois as of press time, Feb. 18.
While all this is weird, it gets even weirder: Adams told authorities that after he left the scene in Owensville, “two people kidnapped him, tied him up upside-down at the South School (Mt. Carmel) monkey bars, and tortured him with steaks and sharp objects” until releasing him, with no physical damage visible.
It’s unclear whether Adams was saying that the “torturers” had anything to do with the truck, but when it was located, there were two sets of footprints in the cab, and the vehicle had sustained unspecified damage.
Adams, at age 18, was charged with Aggravated Battery in a Public Place after having beaten another kid in Mt. Carmel. He was allowed to plead the Class 3 felony down to a misdemeanor Battery and was placed on two years of probation at that time.
He was still on probation when he caught a DUI in November of 2008, but nothing was done to revoke it and he was placed on court supervision in May of 2009.
He had just gotten off that supervision when he was one of a huge number of locals busted in a big pill-and-pot ring in August of 2009, which resulted in felony convictions and sent him of to IDOC for a few months.
He was out and about and running pot for his handlers in March of 2010 when he was busted for Cannabis Delivery more than 10 but less than 30 grams. That, too, got him a pitiful little sentence of five years (translated: less than 2.5) in 2012.
In September of 2010, he also managed to land a misdemeanor Operating While Intoxicated charge in Gibson County.
With all this preferential treatment, it came as no surprise that in early 2013 in Richland County, where Adams had moved to a house with Jordan Fletcher, he was the victim of a gunshot wound as administered by Fletcher.
Fletcher, who had claimed that he had fired at Adams only in self-defense after Adams – in another fit of rage – had attacked and then advanced on Fletcher again, claimed self-defense.
Fletcher spent several months in the Richland County Jail on Aggravated Discharge of a Firearm and Aggravated Domestic Battery, both serious felonies, and the case dragged on until two years ago, when on May 19, 2016, a different prosecutor than the one who’d filed the ridiculous charges, Brad Vaughn (who had taken over for David Hyde the year before), dropped the felonies to a misdemeanor Reckless Conduct charge and Fletcher entered a plea to that.
Fletcher had just gotten off 18 months of probation in November of 2017.
Adams, since that time, has managed to stay under the radar, but that all changed in early February. And if he’s not charged with anything in the incident, the talk that circulated in Richland County when he was shot will likely resurface: That he’s a nark, and authorities will allow him to run amok hurting people and property in an effort to ensure his ongoing compliance in the world of tracking down dopers, all the while allowing their narks to do as much dope as they choose…then acting out badly when they do.