Casey Devol pleads guilty in Franktown double murder

BY ELLIS ARNOLD EARNOLD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

After initially pleading not guilty to killing his sister and her boyfriend in rural Douglas County, Casey Devol reversed course and pleaded guilty weeks before his trial was set to begin.

Devol had pleaded not guilty in September and was set to see trial starting Aug. 7, according to the state judicial branch website.

He pleaded guilty to two charges of second-degree murder on July 19, according to online court records. As a result, his two charges of rstdegree murder were dismissed.

Devol also pleaded guilty to a charge related to cruelty to animals. Authorities say Devol also killed a dog in the incident.

He’s set for a sentencing hearing Aug. 7.

A recording captured audio of the incident where Devol allegedly committed the murders, according to prosecutors.

“What we have are recorded statements of the murder itself which were made by one of the victims,” Andrew Steers, a chief deputy district attorney, has said.

e existence of the recorder was not known, Steers said, until the autopsy in the case that left Jessica Mitchell, 32, and Bryan Todd Gray,

34, dead in the Franktown area. ey were discovered in February 2022 in a garage adjacent to a house they lived in on Russellville Road. Mitchell was Devol’s sister.

Authorities don’t know why some- one chose to record the interaction, Steers said during a March 22 hearing in Douglas County District Court. e recording captured the events leading up to the killings: ree people appeared to be having a dinner and at one point talked about a birthday gift, Steers said. At some point, the man authorities say is Devol leaves and returns and kills the other two people and a dog.

Mitchell was found with a “digital recorder device,” according to her autopsy report.

A coworker of Gray’s discovered him and Mitchell in the Russellville Road garage about 1:30 p.m. Feb. 8, quality as an undergraduate.”

Devol was found and arrested at a hotel in Salina, Kansas, on Feb. 9, 2022. He complied when o cers attempted to place him in custody, according to testimony at the hearing. Autopsy results show the victims had bruising and shallow injuries and had been shot by two di erent e report, released by the Douglas County Coroner’s O ce, shows both victims also had meth, alcohol and marijuana in their systems. In addition to the toxicology reports, notes were made in both autopsies that each had a history of methamphetamine use.

Deputies discovered security footage for the home that showed someone entering the garage carrying “multiple handguns and a long gun.” After a tip from a friend of the family, investigators alleged that Devol is the person in the video.

In his honor, the department renamed a funding program: e Andrew Gelston Graham Graduate Fellowship provides support to outstanding students in the department, including tuition and stipends. Andrew was planning to start graduate school in civil engineering at CU Boulder at the time of his death.

He had lived in Alaska for eight months after nishing undergraduate school, working in the oil elds.

“And they worked 16-hour days six days a week, three weeks at a time, and then they’d get (some time) o ,” his mother said. “But it was brutal.

“And the thing was, he was really good, and they wanted to promote him out of the eld and into the o ce, and he didn’t want any part of a suit,” she laughed. “ at’s why he decided to come home and go to grad school.”

Never ashy, Andrew wanted to “ nd someone nice and settle down and start a family and nd a job — all the normal things,” his mother said. “He was very quiet. He didn’t talk about himself a lot to anybody. It was always about others.”

“He just was a good egg, he really was. And just so fun. And I just, I totally trusted him and knew that in my old age, he’d be there,” his mother said.

Keeping a legacy alive

Years later, his mother remembers the little things: how he liked Carlos Santana and the Eagles. How he’d strum on the guitar and wake his sister up. How he’d “just give her one of his lopsided smiles.” ough the suspects arrested in his killing received varying outcomes in court, Andrew’s mother felt that for her family, “all of us have received life sentences” in losing Andrew. e relationships he wove brought unlikely support into his mother’s life. CU Boulder’s men’s club ultimate Frisbee team, called Mamabird, has been “at my side through this entire thing,” his mother said.

Team members keep in touch by email and send her Mother’s Day wishes. She gets a call from a couple of them on Nov. 6 every year to catch up.

“ ey’re kind of like my adopted sons,” she said.

Although faces on the team have come and gone through the years, the members of Mamabird wear Andrew’s uniform number, 55, on the sleeves of their uniforms in his memory. At the Centex ultimate Frisbee tournament in Texas each year, the CU team members wear mustaches because Andrew started the team’s tradition of sporting the facial hair to that event, his mother said.

His mother set up a GoFundMe fundraising page online to help support the scholarship that CU named in his honor and the ultimate Frisbee team on which he played.

She hopes the page will help others and “keep Andrew’s legacy alive” — though she doesn’t think he would have given thought to what his legacy would be.

“He would (probably) be very embarrassed by all the accolades,” she said, adding: “But he’s the kind of person you don’t forget just because of how he was … he had a presence.”

One person who wrote a tribute to Andrew — one of the many written statements his mother has kept — recounted how Andrew carried himself through the challenges of his sport:

“He had his own style. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, he just didn’t seem to be a ected. And I admired that about him. He was an individual. He was unique.”