A Franklin County Jury Convicted Jason Meade Today. It Still Couldn't Say "Murder."
Six shots. Five in his back. One in his side. A bag of Subway in his hand. And the only word a jury could agree on was "reckless."
Jason Meade was convicted today. Just not of murder.
A Franklin County jury — nine women, three men — found the former sheriff’s deputy guilty of reckless homicide in the December 2020 killing of Casey Goodson Jr. Reckless homicide is a third-degree felony in the state of Ohio. It carries somewhere between nine and thirty-six months. It is the legal equivalent of a jury saying we know what you did; we just couldn’t quite bring ourselves to call it what it was.
On the murder charge, the jury hung. Again. As they did in 2024. Twice now, twelve people from this county have sat in a room with the evidence and failed to agree that what Jason Meade did to Casey Goodson Jr. was murder.
So let me lay the evidence out the way the prosecution did, because somebody should.
Casey Goodson Jr. was twenty-three years old. He was a licensed concealed carry holder. On December 4, 2020, he was walking into his grandmother’s house on the Northeast Side with a bag of Subway sandwiches in one hand and his keys in the other. He had earbuds in. He could not hear what he could not hear.
Jason Meade — a forty-seven-year-old white sheriff’s deputy and Baptist pastor — had finished a shift on a U.S. Marshals task force. Casey was not a target of that task force. Casey was not a suspect in anything. Meade has said, and only Meade has ever said, that Casey waved a gun at him from a passing vehicle. No other witness corroborated that. No camera recorded it. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office did not equip its deputies with body cameras at the time, which is its own indictment for another column.
Meade followed Casey home. To his grandmother’s house.
What happened at that door is the part where the system keeps stumbling. Meade fired six rounds. Five of them entered Casey Goodson Jr. from the back. One entered from the side. When officers arrived, Casey’s licensed firearm was found beneath his body on his grandmother’s kitchen floor with the safety still engaged. The safety. Still on. The gun a 23-year-old man supposedly leveled at a deputy could not have fired if he’d tried.
That is what a Franklin County jury this week was asked to decide was murder. And twice — twice — twelve of our neighbors could not get there.
Reckless homicide is what they got there on. Reckless. As if the issue were a moment of inattention. As if Jason Meade was changing the radio and accidentally let off six rounds into a young Black man’s back. The word “reckless” makes a verdict the system can stomach. It splits a kind of difference. It lets a jury go home.
Casey Goodson Jr. does not get to go home.
Let’s be honest about what this verdict means and what it doesn’t.
It means Jason Meade is the second white law enforcement officer in the state of Ohio convicted of killing a Black man since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in May 2020. The second. In nearly six years. In a state where the names keep coming. That is the bar. Set it on the floor and we still can’t seem to clear it on the first try.
It means the special prosecutor’s office did its job and a partial verdict is, in the words of Tim Merkle, something the state is “pleased with.” It means that on the courthouse steps, the police union president told the cameras he hopes there is no third trial on the murder charge. He hopes. That’s the temperature in 2026.
It means the Goodson family, who already won a $7 million civil settlement from Franklin County in 2024 — taxpayer money, our money, paid out because the county itself wouldn’t say in court what its insurance carrier said in writing — got a partial answer today. Not the answer. A partial answer. The kind that still requires a press conference to explain.
It means that during this trial, Columbus residents hung banners from highway overpasses that read Justice for Casey Goodson Jr. and Convict Murderer Meade. And the judge ordered law enforcement to take them down. In this city. In our city. The pleading of a community for one of its own was deemed prejudicial to a man on trial for shooting a community member six times.
I want to say something to the Kinfolk reading this in Columbus tonight, because we are the ones who carry this.
Casey Goodson Jr. was somebody’s grandbaby. He was bringing food home. He had earbuds in because he was listening to music, which is what 23-year-olds do when they are walking into a house they grew up in. He was at a door he had every right to open. He did everything we tell our boys to do — licensed, lawful, headed home — and it did not save him.
A jury today said Jason Meade was reckless. We say Casey was murdered. Both can be true in a courtroom. Only one is true in our living rooms.
The state may decide whether to try this murder charge a third time. They have not announced. The defense is asking the public to be done with it. Tired. Tired. That’s the word the system reaches for when it is asking the people who buried Casey Goodson Jr. to be quiet now.
We are not done with it. We will not be done with it. Because being done with it is how a county like Franklin pays $7 million on the civil docket and 9 to 36 months on the criminal docket and calls the books closed on a young man who walked to his own door with sandwiches in his hand.
Welcome home, Columbus. We are still saying his name.
Casey Goodson Jr.