“THE WRONG MAN,” CONTINUED... “He came home with some problems,” says his mother, Janet Jarman. After serving in the Army, he graduated from Western Washington University and worked in banking. In 2009, he met a woman named Natasha Clark. They were set up by their friends and immediately hit it off. Clark loved his smile, and remembers how polite and gentlemanly he was. They had their first son together in 2012, and their second two years later. But part of Jarman was suffering. While he didn’t talk about it too much, he was haunted by war. Once, he told Clark, he witnessed one of his friends get shot in the head right in front of him. Eventually, he got treatment for PTSD and bipolar disorder. It helped. The VA gave him medication — but he wasn’t supposed to mix it with alcohol, so he stopped drinking. He and Clark split up in 2016, she says. She moved to Soap Lake, while Jarman lived in Curlew. It wasn’t ideal — Jarman got tired of always having to pick up his sons and drop them off again. He wanted to be with them all the time. So at the end of 2019, he bought a house in Spokane Valley and proposed a deal to Clark: He could live downstairs, and she could live upstairs. But at least the kids would be there. She agreed. “I had already moved half of my stuff over there,” Clark says. That weekend, on Dec. 28, Jarman was moving into his new house, beginning his new life. It’s why, at Outback Steakhouse that Saturday night, Jarman is in a celebratory mood. He drinks a beer. The first beer is followed by another and another, and everything becomes a blur and then suddenly, eight hours later, he finds himself in the backseat of a car, next to some guy in a dark, puffy jacket. In the front seats of the car sit the bartender from Outback and her friend, who are trying to figure out what to do with Jarman, who’s very drunk and ready to pass out. The guy next to him suggests just leaving Jarman there — he can figure out how to get home on his own, witnesses recall. They all argue. Jarman and the other guy step out of the car. A blurry, choppy surveillance video captures what happens next, frame by frame. In one frame, the two are facing each other, maybe 5 feet apart. Jarman appears much thinner. In the next frame, the man wearing the dark jacket has lunged at Jarman and appears to be in the follow through of a right-handed swing. Jarman’s head is cocked back and to the side following the hit. Both fall out of the frame. Seconds later, a handful of onlookers are there surrounding the spot where Jarman lay. The Outback bartender, still in the front seat of the car, sees it all. She’d later describe it to detectives in detail: The guy knocked Jarman “out cold,” then “sat there and just wailed on his face” at least a dozen more times, all within seconds. She calls 911 at 1:58 am, reporting that “some guy just got punched a whole bunch of times,” and adding that he’s bleeding and unresponsive. A man takes the phone from her and says “she’s wrong,” Jarman “fell on the ground because he’s drunk.” But he begs for someone to help this man, choking on his own blood. The bartender takes the phone back. The dispatcher asks, “Who punched him?” “I have absolutely no idea,” the bartender says. “He hit him and took off, and we have no idea who it was.” For days, Jarman is in critical condition at Sacred Heart Medical Center with a section of his skull removed. His entire face is swollen, he has blood caked to his cheek and
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a ventilator is keeping him alive. Friends and family have a difficult time seeing him like this. On Jan. 3, Jarman’s mother, Janet, has to make the worst decision of her life. Doctors say her son won’t be able to recover. She agrees to take him off life support. The decision rips her apart. “A mommy shouldn’t have to do that,” she says.
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The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office had no leads on Jarman’s killer in the hours after he was beaten in the parking lot. None of the witnesses — not even the two women in the car with the guy — say they know who did this to Jarman. On Monday, Dec. 30, Detective Melville is assigned to lead the case. Melville, who declined to comment for this article citing pending litigation, calls the bartender from Outback Steakhouse who witnessed the incident. We’ll call her Witness A. She now says she knows who punched Jarman: A guy named Joe Riley who works at Speakeasy Tattoo at the mall. She didn’t know who it was days ago, but she says she found him on Facebook and thinks it’s him. Melville interviews Witness A and later her friend, Witness B. The Inlander obtained audio of the interviews. We are withholding their names because the women fear for their safety with the killer out free. Witness A, the bartender, describes how after work, she ended up at Ichabod’s late at night. There, she was talking to Jarman, who had been with her all night. She says her friend, Witness B, was talking to another guy — “this guy, Joe, that she knew,” as Witness A puts it. Her friend and this guy “Joe” followed her and Jarman to her place. Jarman looked like he was going to pass out on the couch, however, so they all got back in one car to take him home. But first, they stop at Ichabod’s because one of the girls forgot a jacket. That’s where they get in an argument, the two guys step out, and Jarman is dropped with one punch. To be clear, this witness refers to this other guy as “Joe” when speaking to detectives on Dec. 31 because, by that point, she’d been convinced that they found him on Facebook. At no point in this recorded interview with two detectives does she describe being told this guy’s name was “Joe” on that night. Witness B more explicitly denies knowing the guy as “Joe” when she saw him that night. She, too, believes the killer is Joe Riley days after the assault, but only because of his Facebook page. Melville then presses her, misrepresenting what Witness A told him just hours earlier. “She said that you saw him coming and [said], ‘Hey this is Joe, he does tattoos,’” Melville says, though Witness A didn’t actually say that in the interview. Witness B holds firm. “Yeah, no, I don’t remember ever saying, ‘this is Joe,’ like, at all,” she responds. Melville continues to pressure her, telling her that he doesn’t think she’s telling the entire truth. He asks her “what’s more important: A friendship, or a life?” He brings up that Jarman is in awful shape at the hospital, in a medically induced coma, and that he may die. She gets upset. “You understand this could turn into a homicide investigation, not just an assault?” Melville says. “Yes.” “Somebody could end up getting charged with manslaughter, murder,” Melville says. She understands, she says. ...continued on page 18
Before he died, Daniel Jarman was looking forward to spending more time with his two sons. COURTESY PHOTOS
She calls 911 at 1:58 am, reporting that “some guy just got punched a whole bunch of times,” and adding that he’s bleeding and unresponsive.