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MURRAY — After hundreds of hours of investigation from city, state and federal officials, hundreds of pages of written reports and over $100,000 spent as part of an investigation that went on for over a year, the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office announced Friday that no charges would be filed in the 2023 death of a woman found locked inside a burning storage shed.
Instead, Sim Gill says the death of Morgan Kay Harris, 27, appears to have been "an accidental tragic loss of life."
On Feb. 18, 2023, a fire was reported inside a small storage unit at 4608 S. 900 East. A padlock on the door prevented fire crews from immediately entering. Once inside, the bodies of Harris and her dog were discovered.
Alexander Paul Wardell, 30 — Harris's boyfriend who is suspected to have been living with her in the shed — was arrested for investigation of negligent homicide and kidnapping. Police say Wardell admitted to putting Harris in the storage unit, putting a lock on the door and then leaving.
However, after an extensive investigation that involved the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Gill sending two of his chief deputies to Maryland where several days of burn tests were conducted on a replica storage unit, the district attorney said Friday that investigators reached the conclusion it was "not likely" that Wardell intentionally set the fire.
While the cause of the fire remains "undetermined," Gill says the leading theories are that a cigarette or candle lit inside the shed caught a wicker basket on fire, which quickly spread to numerous other combustible materials stacked in the small space. The district attorney noted that the storage unit had no electricity, heat or windows and was pitch black when the door was shut. He said there was evidence of other candles that had been previously lit inside the storage unit and a lighter was found in Harris' pocket.
Likewise, Harris' manner of death was not determined by the state medical examiner. Harris was allegedly "groggy" when Wardell left the shed to get food at a nearby store. The fire caused the room to rapidly fill with carbon monoxide. Gill says Harris's autopsy revealed a 73% saturation level of carbon monoxide in her blood at the time of death. Typically, he said 30% to 40% will leave a person incapacitated, and 50% will kill a person.
"She gets compromised to the point that intensity of the fire actually melts the chair into her thigh," Gill said. "She is nonresponsive at that point."
Why Harris was so incapacitated and apparently did not move from the chair she was sitting in when the fire started is another question that will likely never be answered, Gill said. As for finding her body on the floor near the locked door, the medical examiner's final report stated that "her final position near the door may only be coincident with her collapse and not a result of an attempted escape. If she never attempted to escape, the lock on the door is irrelevant in her manner of death."
Even if the door did not have a padlock on it, Gill says investigators do not believe she would have made it out.
As for the reason for putting a lock on the door in the first place — which could only be opened from the outside — Gill says the investigation shows that's simply how Harris and Wardell kept their door closed. He says there was no indication she was being held in the storage unit against her will, which is why he also declined to file a charge of kidnapping.
"How do I prove she did not consent to that? With what evidence do I do that? Who do I put on the stand?" he asked. "We found no evidence going through her phone, his phone, all the material that we could gather, that led us to get to any of that point … we looked. We scoured, we looked if there was any humanly possible way to articulate to meet those elements for the purpose of filing charges. We could not get there."
Before announcing his findings publicly on Friday, Gill says he met with Harris' family.
"Whenever you lose somebody, the analytics, the cold facts, are going to be a poor substitute to the loss that you're feeling," he said. "I have to look at it with a cold eye of the evidence and with the science and what I can prove going into court. And (the family is) feeling the loss like you and I would feel. Of course, they are heartbroken. They're in pain, they're in grief. And I wish I could give them some measure of justice if there was some measure of culpability. I can't there."
Wardell remained in the Utah State Prison on Friday for convictions in other cases and violations with Adult Probation and Parole.
