Video shows detective saying to Keegan, ‘You’re not being 100% honest’

By Kevin Opsahl, Rogue Valley Times

Jurors on Wednesday watched a video of murder defendant Robert Keegan give his version of events to police just hours after an altercation in 2020 that resulted in the shooting death of a Black teenager outside an Ashland hotel.

Keegan, who is white, is charged with second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm for allegedly shooting 19-year-old Aidan Ellison over an argument about loud music in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn in Ashland on Nov. 23, 2020.

“I had a jacket on. I had a pistol in the pocket. I pulled it up and I said, ‘Please, stop,'” Keegan, 49, told Jackson County Sheriff’s Detective Steven Bohn in the videotape. “He just started charging at me again, and I just pulled the trigger. He automatically just ran.”

Ellison ended up in a parking lot median with thick bushes, just steps away from where the alleged shooting took place. Medical Examiner James Olson testified Wednesday that Ellison, who sustained a single bullet through the heart, likely survived less than a minute.

At the time of the shooting, Keegan, a displaced Almeda Fire victim, was living at the Stratford Inn with his son, Paul, 11. Ellison was unemployed and living there with a former co-worker. 

In his police interrogation at Ashland Police Department headquarters, Keegan said on Nov. 23, 2020, he heard “loud, boom, boom bass music” and told Ellison “please turn it down. It’s waking up my son.”

Keegan said he saw a car running with its lights on and he spotted Ellison, who “starts throwing up fingers at me” and tells the 49-year-old, “You come down here.”

Keegan went down to the motel lobby and told the clerk, Angel Carlin, about the music. Carlin went out to the parking lot to talk to Ellison. Getting antsy, Keegan joined them, and tensions rose. 

“He said, ‘F-you, N–ger!’ and just started going off on me,” Keegan said. “I said, ‘I am not a N–ger.’ … and he just started punching. So I just started backing up. I was like, ‘Whoa, dude!’ One fell swing again.”

That’s when Keegan noted he had the jacket with his pistol, and he eventually discharged it, he told police. 

Bohn and Keegan spoke in police headquarters for some time, with Keegan going over his version of events multiple times and Bohn telling him to slow down and talk about key moments.

Eventually, Bohn told Keegan that his statements were not lining up with what investigators were learning. 

“What the investigation is starting to reveal is, you weren’t just a little perturbed,” Bohn said. “I want a little more honesty from you, as to how frustrated you are, how the altercation went. You’re not being 100% honest with us tonight.”

Bohn said he’d prefer to hear less about the profane exchanges between Keegan and Ellison. 

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn,” Bohn told Keegan. “I want honesty. I want truth.”

Keegan told a similar version of events, but also claimed he could not easily run away from Ellison.

“I was just backing up, just trying to get away from him,” Keegan said, taking a tissue and wiping away tears from his eyes. “He kept charging and charging.”

Bohn used some of the interview to tell Keegan he sympathized with the man who was living in a hotel with his son and suffering from back problems. But the situation, Bohn contended, was also “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and led Keegan to do what he did to Ellison.

“You were finally tired of all the crap,” Bohn said in the video interview.

Bohn then criticized Keegan’s way of handling the situation that night.

“Nothing gets worked out when people are all charged up,” Bohn said. “People, generally, when they’re amped up to that level, they tend to get more amped up. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a bar or a hotel; they don’t usually ramp themselves down.”

Bohn pointed out that Keegan allegedly inserted himself into a conflict that he never even had to get out of bed for. 

“I’m not going to run down to the lobby; I’m going to call the lobby,” Bohn told Keegan.

While the detective was stern with Keegan, he also pleaded with him to “Help me help you; you’re a good person” in order to get the 49-year-old father to share more information.

“I made a bad choice not to walk away,” Keegan said at one point. “I was upset. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Two members of Ellison’s family were in the courtroom Wednesday accompanied by a victim’s advocate. They had some pointed reactions to certain parts of Keegan’s police interrogation, but did not lash out vocally.

Earlier in Wednesday’s proceedings, Ellison’s family and others in Judge Timothy Barnack’s courtroom were moved as they saw images of the Black teen’s autopsy. Those images included Ellison lying lifeless in the morgue with his heart deflated from a gunshot wound

Olson, the medical examiner, testified that Ellison was 6 feet tall and weighed 205 pounds. Olson confirmed the bullet that was presented as evidence was the same one he extracted from the teenager during the autopsy. 

Olson testified the bullet entered the right side of Ellison’s chest, not far from the nipple. The bullet then passed through the heart before coming out under left Ellison’s armpit, exiting with a much bigger wound and lodging into Ellison’s left arm. 

Keegan’s trial will continue through the rest of this week and might conclude sometime next week.

Reporter Kevin Opsahl can be reached at 458-488-2034 or kopsahl@rv-times.com. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.

May 4 update: Corrected spelling of judge’s first name.