Day 3: Primary witness changed story multiple times as suspect maintained innocence

According to DeAngula “Shante” Montgomery, the state’s primary witness against Jamar Huggins, this is how Mariah and Angela Eckler came to be held at gunpoint in their home a few days before Christmas in 2012:

Mongomery said Huggins showed up at her house the night of Dec. 20 cursing and threatening to hurt her if she didn’t help him find Adrian Moore, who had allegedly borrowed drugs from him “on credit,” Montgomery told Horry County Police Detective Jonathan Martin.

She felt obligated to get into Huggins’ dark blue Cadillac and lead him to a house on Memory Lane that Moore had been sharing with Angela Eckler, his then-fiance, Montgomery said.

Huggins wore a mask and pointed a gun in the face of Eckler and her 12-year-old daughter, Montgomery said. He was one of the men who dragged Angela Eckler through the house and was yelling, “Where’s the [expletive] money?”

The two men eventually forced the Ecklers into a bathroom before rummaging through Moore’s belongings and stealing Mariah Eckler’s birthday money — $15 — and a few video games.

Changing stories

Montgomery was so specific in this version of her confession — after initially denying everything — she supplied a cell phone number and directions to Huggins’s home.

She’d later say she knew what Huggins looked like because she saw him through a hotel window as Huggins and Moore allegedly conducted a drug transaction.

“I just didn’t want to be a part of it,” Montgomery said. “Had he not had a gun and I didn’t smoke [the drugs], I would have called the police on him.”

Montgomery said the two men pushed her out of the way as they forced their way into the house. She ran back to the car and was only vaguely aware of what was going to happen, she told Martin.

“When this man [Huggins] come to my house and I know his reputation, he is dangerous,” Montgomery went on. “He don’t care about punching you in the face, taking his gun and pistol whipping you. He don’t care what kind of person you is. If you owe him something, he want it. I just know he is that determined to get it. If I had a known he was going to run in there and do all of that, I would’ve just took the knockout in my face.”

But that wasn’t her only version of the events, and not everything she said matched up with what Moore had earlier told the detective.

Montgomery claimed she came to know what Huggins looked like by peeking out of a hotel window — but Huggins would later say that though they didn’t know each other well, she had performed oral sex on him once.

He also once angrily told Montgomery he didn’t want to have much else to do “with no crack head,” according to his sister.

Montgomery also said she had only “hung out with” Adrian Moore a few times — but Moore said Montgomery helped him sell drugs.

Montgomery initially said she and Moore only bought drugs from another dealer, a man she knew as “Juice.” Montgomery later said she saw Moore receive drugs from Huggins.

During the initial interrogation, Montgomery said she was pushed violently out of the way when the men rushed into the house, and that she did not know they would be robbing those inside. In a later statement, Montgomery said she ran back to the car because she thought Eckler’s barking dog was attacking the two men.

Under oath during the Huggins trial, her story changed again, to this:

“[W]hen I first knocked on the door [Angela Eckler] didn’t open her screen door. She opened her first door, and after I asked for [Moore] she say he wasn’t there. So I turned around and walked off,” Montgomery said, according to transcript of the trial. “When I walked off, she opened her screen door and was hollering at me, trying to make me stop so she could tell me where he was at, but I kept on walking and got back inside the vehicle.”

“I knew what was going to happen … that she was going to be robbed.”

On the stand, Montgomery identified a man she said helped plan the home invasion — a man she had been involved in with an unrelated robbery.

During the initial interrogation, Montgomery described Huggins as 5 feet, 6 or 7 inches tall and 280 pounds with long dreadlocks and a “grill” (jewelry for the teeth, usually gold or silver, popular in Hip Hop culture) in his mouth.

Huggins did have dreadlocks and once had a “grill” but he discarded the tooth jewelry well before the Ecklers were robbed.

After further questioning by Martin, she said Huggins weighed “up to 200 pounds.”

Huggins is 5 foot 6 inches tall and weighed about 150 pounds.

During the initial interrogation, Montgomery told Martin she was afraid of Huggins.

But during a subsequent recorded telephone conversation while she was in jail, Montgomery expressed no fear about the man she called the “boy with the gun.” She said that man — she did not say who he was — was being “a [expletive] about” the robbery and should just shut up.

Moore, the alleged target of the home invasion at his fiance’s home, told Detective Martin that Montgomery owed money to drug dealers who may have targeted him because of his relationship with her.

Montgomery told Martin the opposite — that it was Moore who owed money.

None of these inconsistencies would be explored during the trial.

Nevertheless, Martin used Montgomery’s confession to seek an arrest warrant for Huggins. A judge granted it.

A few days later, two U.S. Marshals showed up at the home where Huggins was taking care of his ailing 90-year-old grandmother and took him to J. Reuben Long Detention Center, a jail named after the grandfather of the man who would defend Huggins in court.

‘Do some more investigating’

By the time the case reached a courtroom almost two years after the crime, Huggins had repeatedly denied any involvement even though Detective Martin used what he called the same “police deception” with Huggins that he had used to convince Montgomery to confess.

Martin pretended to have more evidence than he did. He produced a photo of Adrian Moore, the alleged target of the home invasion. Huggins quickly said he never saw Moore and didn’t know who he was — the kind of clear-cut denial that would have been damaging had any connection between Huggins and Moore been unearthed. There was no such evidence of a connection.

Huggins practically begged Martin to do further investigation, according to audio from the recorded interrogation.

“I just want you to please don’t just look at me as, ‘OK, I got this case closed, this a criminal,” Huggins said. “No, man. Please?! Sometimes you have innocent people who get jammed up in situations.”

Martin told him he had the right man, that he knew Huggins was guilty.

Huggins admitted he had gotten into trouble when he was younger and that he got into fights and still smoked pot occasionally but hadn’t touched hard drugs, like cocaine, in almost a decade.

He had been shot before, a close friend had recently been murdered and other friends were serving long prison sentences. Those hard street realities convinced him to change, he told Martin.

He was he was the primary caretaker of a 90-year-old grandmother who suffers from a variety of ailments, a woman who coughs “all night” and “calls my name for me to come in there and bring her some water” or call 911.

He had been doing that around the clock for at least two years by that point, a fact his mother and sisters confirmed, and was about to land a job with Wal-Mart until he was arrested.

“I just hope you do some more investigating because I ain’t had nothing to do with this; real talk,” Huggins told Martin. “You can check my background and my record. … I’m locked up for something I ain’t had nothing to do with.”

Martin never told Huggins when or where the break-in occurred. Instead, Martin withheld that information while telling Huggins things that weren’t true, hoping to trip up Huggins into a confession or something that could be used against him during the trial, as many police officers are trained to do and the Supreme Court allows.

Huggins speculated it could have happened late one night when Montgomery and an acquaintance of theirs borrowed his car and brought it back a short while later “looking all strange.”

He thought they used it to have sex.

Huggins’ mother, Helen Huggins, said she knew where her son was that night — in his room, in the bed.

After a late night at a Conway Bingo parlor a couple of miles away, she and a friend, Jennette Scott, returned home and momentarily disturbed his sleep. Her son didn’t leave the house until several hours later, she said.

“We already knew that girl was lying because we saw [Jamar] that night,” Scott said during an interview with The Sun News earlier this summer.

Martin never asked either of them about Huggins’ whereabouts.

Horry County Police Chief Saundra Rhodes said it wasn’t Martin’s responsibility to ask about an alibi. If she was Huggins’ mother and had that kind of information, she would have made sure everyone knew, Rhodes said.

But because Martin used “police deception” during his interrogation with Huggins, there was initial confusion about which night, making it difficult to pin down a reliable alibi.

“I told the Marshals and I told the people at the courthouse, but nobody would listen,” Helen Huggins said.

She never spoke with her son’s attorney, John Long, though, and it’s not clear why. Long didn’t want to comment for the story because the case is being appealed.

The jury would know none of this when they met to consider Montgomery’s testimony. Helen Huggins and Scott wouldn’t be called during the two-day trial.

Neither would jurors know that Huggins had turned down multiple plea deals — including one that would have freed him almost immediately — believing it was important to “send the right message to his two children,” his sister Dinedra Smith said.

“He wasn’t going to say he did something he didn’t do,” she said.

During the trial, the prosecution’s star witness unexpectedly gave Huggins and his family hope the jury would also believe he was innocent.

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 3:28 PM with the headline "Day 3: Primary witness changed story multiple times as suspect maintained innocence."