One Year Without Justice
On July 20th, 2020, Grant Solomon’s life came to an abrupt end. On June 13th he celebrated his 18th birthday. Five weeks later he died in a roadside ditch in Gallatin, Tennessee.
Grant’s untimely death has been described as a “tragic accident”. Although it has been met with an outpouring of sadness, grief, and mourning by his friends and loved ones, it has never been thoroughly investigated by the police. In light of long-held doubts and newly surfaced evidence, for many their grief has turned into anger. They demand a long-overdue investigation to rule out a shocking but increasingly likely possibility: that Grant’s death was caused by his father, Aaron Solomon.
Solomon vehemently denies these allegations and has previously filed suit against 29 defendants to prevent them from sharing their suspicions. Among them were Grant’s mother Angelia Huffines as well as his best friend Wynn Hicks. The recently dismissed lawsuit accused them of libel and slander in connection to these and other allegations. As evidence, Solomon submitted a signed statement by Sumner County Assistant District Attorney Ronald Blanton stating that “there was not even enough evidence to reopen the investigation”.
This might be the result of the lackluster initial investigation undertaken by Gallatin PD, which was brief, superficial, and uncritical. In the wake of the young man’s death, police interviewed only Aaron Solomon and the owner of the property on which the death occurred. They made no efforts to forensically examine the Toyota Tacoma that allegedly malfunctioned, although pictures that were taken by Gallatin PD at the scene clearly show the car was in “Park” once it had come to rest over Grant Solomon’s body. And despite a well-known history of domestic and family violence, police did not reach out to his mom, his sister, or anyone else he was close to.
The voices among Grant’s loved ones doubting Aaron’s innocence are growing stronger. This is in no small part due to the evidence released by an Instagram account calling itself freedomforgracie. The files and pictures leaked by the social media page make it clear that a lack of evidence is unlikely to be the reason for Blanton’s refusal to act. They also show that the “tragic accident” narrative does not hold up to scrutiny.
Aaron Solomon and Grant met at a baseball training court that day for Grant’s baseball training, which was scheduled to start at 9 am. Aaron arrived first. At about 8:41 am Grant arrived in his white Toyota Tacoma. He parked next to his father, both of their vehicles facing towards the Institute building, their rears facing towards the rocky ditch where Grant would soon meet his end. Then, at around 8:43 am Grant was severely injured. What exactly caused Grant’s ultimately fatal injuries is unclear though.
Aaron Solomon has given several statements on the matter, among them a written statement and an oral account given to police, the 911 call that has been published by “freedomforgracie” and a series of short video clips, featuring him and his friend Sam Johnson. In the clips, created only days after his son’s death, Solomon re-enacts the events of that morning, going so far as to lay down in the ditch where his son had died.
While all the statements have some inconsistencies, the message he ultimately wants to convey is very clear — Grant got out of his truck to get his bat, Aaron then looked down to check a work email, looked up, and noticed that the truck was gone. Looking for his son he realized that the truck “must’ve slipped out of gear or maybe it wasn’t in ‘park’ or something”. Then, the errant vehicle rolled down the slight incline of the parking lot, knocked Grant over, and dragged him down the asphalt and into the ditch.
Even before any published documents gave rise to public outcry, this story did not sit right with Angelia Huffines. When she viewed her son’s body, she realized that there were no scratches or abrasions anywhere on his body. “He looked just like he always did…” she remarked, “Well, of course, there was blood in his hair, he looked like he’d gotten into a fight. But not like he’d been dragged.” The personal effects of his she had received, his shoes and a cross necklace he wore, did not match her ex-husband’s narrative either. She explained that “there wasn’t even a scuff on his shoe. His hands — they weren’t scratched. My son was a fighter. If he was being dragged down a hill he would’ve tried to hold on to something, anything.”
About 10 months later, “freedomforgracie” started posting pictures, videos, and files. The identity of the user is unknown, but the material they’ve leaked to the public has been invaluable. Among them were medical documents about the injuries Grant sustained before his death. They corroborate the doubts Grant’s loved ones had held. The most widely publicized of the pictures shows an injury chart. It indicates that Grant had received one blunt force injury to the back of the head as well as one bruise on his left cheek, a small bruise on his right hip, and a larger one his the left side towards the ribs. A bruise is usually caused by an impact, like hitting the ground from some height or getting punched. But getting dragged does not create much impact. Instead, it creates abrasions; the rough asphalt sands off the victim’s skin, like a full-body skimmed knee.
Further annotation on the chart shows what measures the EMTs and hospital staff had undertaken to save Grant’s life — an intra-osseous infusion, a needle decompression of the left side of the lung, and a cervical collar. He had also been intubated and catheterized. All their efforts would remain futile though. After receiving about 30 minutes of CPR and despite EMTs doing everything they could, Grant was pronounced dead at 9.28 am that day.
At this point, the Medical Examiner was contacted. Tennessee law prescribes that the medical examiner needs to be contacted when a death occurs due to “violence or trauma”. However, medical death investigator John Poss and Sumner County Medical Examiner John Ray Pinkston decided that no autopsy was necessary. According to the Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner (OSCME) guidelines, they would’ve likely relied on “information obtained from family members or friends of the deceased, law enforcement, and the death scene” to make that determination. Conveniently the only family member present at the scene was Aaron Solomon and just like Gallatin PD, Pinkston and Poss probably thought the father’s explanation sufficient at a glance.
While there is no clear legal statute on when an autopsy must be performed, the County Medical Examiner Handbook suggests an autopsy needs to be requested when the manner of death is determined to be inconclusive as well as in all cases of homicide. Had investigators talked to Grant’s friends or family, there would have been ample doubt as to the accidental manner of his death. They would have learned about the allegations of sexual abuse, manipulation, and violence that his family has leveled against Aaron. They would have learned about the appalling ways in which Aaron Solomon had treated his son. According to a report by the Guardian ad Litem, Grant said that his father would monitor his bathroom times, as well as limit his caloric intake because Grant was “too fat”. Perhaps they would have even learned that Grant, who according to his mother saw it as his duty to protect his younger sister Gracie from their father’s sexual abuse, hoped to testify in court and potentially gain custody of his little sister once he turned 18. They would have learned all that if they had asked, but they didn’t.
Instead, they rushed to file a report that, while it might just so meet the minimum requirements for a medicolegal death examination as stated in the CME handbook, leaves out extremely important details such as precisely which injuries the decedent had suffered. The standardized form has two crisp black line drawings of a human body printed on it — one of the front, one of the back. Yet, both are left blank. The only real information that can be retrieved from the document is the brief narrative field between the two injury charts. It merely states that the decedent showed “lacerations of the scalp”.
As the cause of death, the report lists “Multiple Traumatic Injuries”, a diagnosis that is not necessarily uniformly used amongst trauma physicians. The most common definition, given by doctors Keel and Trentz in their paper “Pathophysiology of Polytrauma” is “the condition of a person who has been subjected to multiple traumatic injuries, such as a serious head injury in addition to a serious burn. The term is defined via an Injury Severity Score (ISS) equal to or greater than 16.” The ISS is calculated by a matrix of 9 different body regions and an injury score ranging from 1 (mild) to 6 (unsurvivable). The only injuries mentioned in the report, lacerations to the scalp, would indicate that Grant died of one single unsurvivable wound.
There may be some contention as to whether Grant suffered a pneumothorax, an accumulation of air in the chest cavity that compresses the lung, seeing as EMTs performed a needle decompression on his left side, also sometimes known as a chest tube. However emergency medicine at the scene often does not allow for more advanced diagnostic techniques and a chest tube is commonly placed when a pneumothorax is suspected. Even if Grant had suffered a pneumothorax though, the threshold for a diagnosis of Multiple Traumatic Injuries would not have been met. This would lead to the conclusion that Grant’s actual cause of death is what would usually be called a blunt force trauma, also known as being hit on the head.
In the days after Grant’s death, his mother reports that she was repeatedly visited by members of her ex-husband’s church who she described as “invasive” and said that “they tried to tell me all sorts of things, that he had internal bleeding and all of that…”. One could assume this was done to ease her doubts about Grant’s manner of death and perhaps even to combat her suspicions regarding Aaron’s involvement, although as yet there’s no evidence to suggest that church members did this at his instruction.
An autopsy could have easily eliminated her fears, provided that Aaron was telling the truth about what happened to his son. And while some of Aaron’s defenders have correctly pointed out that in cases in which an autopsy deemed to be required by the M.E., family members cannot deny it, release forms signed by Aaron also show that he did not request either a post mortem examination or an autopsy. Efforts to exhume Grant’s body are ongoing but they’re significantly hindered by law enforcement’s unwillingness to see the flaws in their investigation.
Another significant factor is the truck itself and the transmission that allegedly failed and caused the accident. While it is not required by US law that the owner of a vehicle makes a report of a car defect, that’s what any grieving parent would do, if only to ensure that other parents would not have to suffer the same loss they did. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration makes reporting these failures exceedingly easy, but Aaron never reported the faulty transmission to them. Coincidentally, no one else in the United States seems to have reported anything like it either.
He was however making efforts to stop the car from being inspected. Mr. Solomon made sure to get the mildly damaged vehicle out of the towing yard before it could undergo any forensic investigation by police and subsequently convinced a local Farm Bureau claims adjuster to declare it a total loss. He then sold it to a scrapyard. It seems he hoped to circumvent the insurance’s post-accident inspection and, ultimately, to make any trace of the car that killed his son disappear.
A few weeks ago, however, the aforementioned Instagram account revealed that Grant’s mother Angie was actually in possession of the vehicle, having searched for it at dozens of scrap yards to preserve the evidence that might help convict her son’s alleged murderer. Soon after the user also posted excerpts from a forensic examination of the vehicle which further incriminated Mr. Solomon.
The crash investigator wrote that he was able to retrieve data from the event recorder, a device that functions similarly to a black box in airplanes, recording impacts as well as operative functions like seatbelt status, acceleration, and use of the brake. It’s important to note that it does not record absolute time. Instead, it is limited to recording time relative to the crash. The data revealed two recorded impact events. During both of these, the driver’s side seatbelt was fastened and both acceleration and brake were used in maneuvering the car.
This leaves two options:
a. someone was sitting at the steering wheel and purposefully navigated the car into Grant, killing him, or
b. there was no crash event involved in Grant’s death. Since nearly all sources assert that Aaron was the only witness to the incident, this would in turn make him the only suspect in the death of his son.
Only one source claims that there were other witnesses to the incident: Aaron Solomon. Although he does not mention them during his police statement or in the disturbing video series of “re-enactments” in which he attempts to explain his son’s death, in the 911 call obtained by “freedomforgracie” he says that he “got three guys here”. During the call, he also frequently seems to be shouting something to the alleged witnesses. No other report makes mention of these persons. Officer Wilson of the Gallatin PD explicitly states in his investigation that “no other witnesses could be located at this time.” Listening closely to the 911 call, 45 seconds elapse between when Aaron last calls out to them and when the howling of sirens announces the arrival of police and EMS. Are 45 seconds enough for the mysterious Samaritans to flee the scene of their good deed?
A year has passed, yet it is still unknown who they are or if they ever even existed. A mother, a sister, and a community are without answers. A dead boy is without justice. Angie talks about her son in the present tense frequently. “Grant is with us.”, she says. “He gives me strength. He keeps me going.”
I’ve verified the facts in this article and put all the sources into a link bin. If you want to honor Grant’s memory, consider sharing his and Gracie’s story. There is also an ongoing petition to reopen the investigation into his death.
