Town note
Three towns in the area, Gunpowder Town, Foster's Neck and Joppa, were merged into what is now Joppatowne.
about 0:04:06Spoilers are covered until your reading preferences load.
FILE 442 / 18 November 2023 / 72 MIN / express
This week we're going to Joppatowne, Maryland, about a half hour outside of Baltimore. about 0:02:51
Three towns in the area, Gunpowder Town, Foster's Neck and Joppa, were merged into what is now Joppatowne.
about 0:04:06Gunpowder Town, usually called Gunpowder, was a failed English settlement and the first attempt to settle on the Gunpowder River; it was abandoned because the location was poor.
about 0:04:26The land where the town stands was farmland growing mostly string beans until 1961, when the Panets Company acquired it and began building planned communities and suburbs.
about 0:04:38Three towns in the area, Gunpowder Town, Foster's Neck and Joppa, were merged into what is now Joppatowne.
about 0:04:06Gunpowder Town, usually called Gunpowder, was a failed English settlement and the first attempt to settle on the Gunpowder River; it was abandoned because the location was poor.
about 0:04:26The land where the town stands was farmland growing mostly string beans until 1961, when the Panets Company acquired it and began building planned communities and suburbs.
about 0:04:38"12,992"
No direction stated.
As told in 2023 about 0:03:29
"$97,887"
Comparison: "high". Direction: above.
As told in 2023 about 0:03:36
"$299,300"
Comparison: "below the national average". Direction: below.
As told in 2023 about 0:03:49
2.7 / 5 · average of 7
“The quintessential American town, the perfect suburb, safe and great for all types of people.”about 0:04:59
“The weather is appropriate for all seasons, warm in summer and cold in winter.”about 0:05:15
“A beautiful, family-friendly place to raise a family, with a park and a football field, public events and caring schools.”about 0:05:35
“Pretty close to the water but very loud thunderstorms.”about 0:06:45
“Hard to find a good boss to work for; many are immature and self-centred.”about 0:07:01
“Since the pandemic and the new influx of people it is one of the worst places the reviewer has lived: angry people, high crime from neighbouring Edgewood, and a sheriff's office overwhelmed by what locals call little Baltimore.”about 0:07:18
“There are no attractions at all; every sports team is twenty minutes away.”about 0:07:52
Joppatowne, Maryland, is a suburban community of 12,992 people about half an hour outside Baltimore, in Harford County. It was put together from three older settlements, Gunpowder Town, Foster's Neck and Joppa, and the land it stands on was farmland growing mostly string beans until 1961, when the Panets Company began building planned communities there.
The family lived on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, and from December 2011 they had a house guest, Kujo Agyei Kodi, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher from Ghana who had come to the United States on a student visa, had degrees from Temple University, and was waiting for deportation paperwork.
On 10 December he punched holes in the walls of a computer lab in the Turner Armory and stapled a poster over the damage, and staff found burn marks on his arm that he called tribal markings. Instructors called him unusually angry; one described him as a Virginia Tech waiting to happen, and he was removed from the ROTC programme. At an anti-hazing forum on 31 January 2012 he kept asking about blood sacrifices and university shootings. His social media was a torrent of all-caps posts about death cults, ethnic cleansing, human sacrifice and military documents, sometimes more than two hundred tweets in a day.
On 19 May 2012 he attacked a fellow ROTC student, Joshua Caesar, at a campus apartment. Caesar suffered a fractured skull, a broken shoulder and blindness in his left eye. Barred from campus, he moved back into the family home on 25 May.
That same morning Kodi left the house at about 5.30 a.m. in shorts and a T-shirt to jog, leaving his wallet, phone and identification inside. He never came back.
Jared had gone downstairs and found two stacked metal containers under a blanket in the laundry room, containing a human head and two hands. A search found a metal cage and a plastic tub of decaying animals in the backyard, and two hands and a head hidden upstairs.
He said he had found Kodi sleeping, murdered him with an axe, chopped him up with a knife and dismembered him because he did not want him to come back to life, then ate his heart and part of his brain. He told detectives the rest of the body was in a dumpster three doors down, outside the Joppatowne Baptist Church at Trimble Road, and it was found there.
He remains there. His explanation, as the episode tells it, was that he believed reptilian aliens were going to destroy the earth and that he was killing the first wave of them, starting with Caesar and then Kodi. Kodi's family said they took little comfort from the resolution because they had no idea how long he would be held.
May 2012 / the family home on Terrapin Terrace, Joppatowne, Maryland
As told in the episode, on 18 November 2023.
Accused
May 19th, 2012 / apartment 304 at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland
As told in the episode, on 18 November 2023.
Accused
Public places are marked on the map.
body found
about 0:52:07school
about 0:11:26crime scene
about 0:31:27school
about 0:16:06school
about 0:11:05school
about 0:11:05school
about 0:38:49hospital
about 1:03:31police
about 0:44:11church
about 0:08:47landmark
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