DAVISON, Mich. – A Michigan man will be sentenced on Friday after being found guilty of premeditated murder after his late wife’s breast milk helped prove that he laced her cereal with a lethal dose of heroin, according to officials.
Jason Harris, 47, of Davison, was found guilty on Nov. 17 of first-degree premeditated murder, solicitation of murder and delivery of a controlled substance causing death.
Christina Ann Thompson Harris, 36, died in September 2014. Officials said Harris prepared a bowl of cereal for his wife and laced it with a lethal dose of heroin. Her sisters never stopped fighting for justice.
The victim’s sisters Katrina Sharon and Patricia Hutchinson investigated their sisters murder. Davison police didn’t consider the death a murder until the sisters started investigating.
“A health 36-year-old who doesn’t wake up is not ordinary. That should have been suspect from the get-go and it wasn’t, so we had to fight for her,” Patricia Hutchinson said.
Their first concern was how the crime scene was handled the day their sister’s body was found inside her Davison home. Her death was deemed an accidental drug overdose.
“As soon as my sister’s body left the house, Jason had access to that, his home, and the officer left when she left,” Katrina Sharon said.
The family kept telling police to check Christy’s breast milk as it would show she was not doing drugs. No tests were run.
“They had information at their fingertips that they ignored within the first 48 hours,” Katrina Sharon said.
More than six years passed and police didn’t take any action. The family filed a civil suit and again it was the sisters doing some of the investigating.
Read: Can Michigan mother’s breast milk reveal who killed her?
“Because the police kept saying, ‘We don’t know. If he got the heroin, where did he get it?’ So I was engulfed in this world of drugs that I did not take part in at all and didn’t know anything about,” Katrina Sharon said.
The sisters tracked down friends, old coworkers of their sister’s husband -- looking for any tidbit of information they could find. Then the frozen breast milk they had saved from their sister was the turning point. They had it tested and it was clean of drugs.
“I mean, it was for my sister. I know she didn’t use drugs,” Patricia Hutchinson said.
It would later come out in court that Harris gave his wife a bowl of cereal the night she died and that cereal was laced with a lethal dose of heroin.
“It’s surreal, just because we’ve been fighting so long that I don’t -- it’s almost like I don’t know what to do now. How do you close this chapter?” Patricia Hutchinson said.
The Local 4 Defenders reached out to Davison police and the Davison city manager and nobody was willing to talk about the case or answer why the police department didn’t do more in the investigation in the beginning.
“I just don’t want anyone else to have to go through this. They -- people do not deserve this,” Katrina Sharon said.
While the sisters accomplished what they wanted -- finding the truth -- they still lost their sister.
“It’s hard to have kids because she didn’t get to meet them, she doesn’t get to see them,” Patricia Hutchinson said.
The family has been keeping Christina Ann Thompson Harris’ children out of the spotlight as there is a guardianship fight going on between the two sets of grandparents.
Jason Harris is expected to be sentenced Friday morning.
GoFundMe: Justice For Christy’s Girls