Legal experts: evidence likely didn’t prove murder in Carl DeBrodie case

5 people have been indicted in connection with the death of Carl DeBrodie, and two of them are charged with involuntary manslaughter.

While some people have called for murder charges in the case, former Cole County prosecutor Bill Tackett said investigators likely didn’t find the evidence for any kind of murder charges.

“You have to go with the intent and if that’s not there and there wasn’t intent to cause this death by whatever means, you have to drop back,” he said.

It all comes back to intent. Someone who is charged or convicted of murder had a known intention that they were going to kill someone. Tacket said based on this involuntary manslaughter charge, prosecutors likely didn’t have that intent. Instead, they found the suspects allegedly acted dangerously and caused DeBrodie’s death.

“It basically is an accident that you caused by your actions recklessly,” he said.

Tackett said he knows that it’s frustrating to see a charge that carries a lower sentence.

“In the end, you can only go on the evidence you have,” he said. “Lot of times as a prosecutor, you’d like to do something more and you think something more should be done, but in the end we have the four corners of a document, and that’s the evidence that’s built into that,” he said. “That’s all we have.”

Tackett doesn’t think there will be murder charges on a state or federal level, because those officials are operating on the same evidence.

The reason this took so long to get to a grand jury is because there were so many moving parts to sift through before it could get to the court system, Tackett said.

“This is an unusual case, to say the least,” he said.