More than five years after he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, Jason McDermitt is sticking to his account that he did not kill his FedEx Ground coworker Morgan Fox, a 29-year-old mother who was shot to death in Plain Township.
He made his first public comments to a nationwide TV audience on “Dateline NBC,” which aired his remarks during a prison interview near the end of a two-hour episode titled “Breaking Point” on May 8.
In April 2021, McDermitt, who lived in Jackson Township, chose not to testify in his defense at his trial in Stark County Common Pleas Court for aggravated murder with a gun specification and menacing by stalking. Jurors found that after Fox cut off contact with him, McDermitt shot her twice in the head in her driveway on Frazer Avenue NW around 2 a.m. on Oct. 28, 2020, as she got into her car to go to work.
Her boyfriend, whom detectives eventually ruled out as a suspect, found her dead hours later. Fox left behind an 8-year-old daughter. The jury found McDermitt guilty of all charges after deliberating for less than 24 hours.
McDermitt, now a 35-year-old inmate at Noble Correctional Institute in Caldwell in Noble County, said the jury made a big mistake.
Dateline correspondent Josh Mankiewicz asked, “Did you kill Morgan Fox?”
McDermitt, wearing a jumpsuit, said, “I did not.”
He said he was home in his apartment at the time of the shooting and didn’t leave until he went to work.
Mankiewicz asked, “Were you obsessed with her?”
McDermitt replied, “I was not, no.”
An attorney for Fox’s estate said on May 7 that Fox’s mother and stepfather have chosen not to comment about the Dateline episode.
‘You’ve got to be like the unluckiest guy in America if you’re telling the truth.’
McDermitt’s statements came after Dateline showed viewers surveillance video from the FedEx warehouse where McDermitt looked through Fox’s phone for an extended period of time. Video clips that he had recorded surreptitiously of her without her knowledge. His many texts to Fox that went unanswered. The many pictures from Snapchat of Fox that McDermitt had downloaded onto his phone. Traffic camera video of a vehicle that shared characteristics of McDermitt’s blue Ford Focus on Main Street in North Canton shortly before and after the shooting that was on a route between his home and Fox’s home. Phone location data that showed McDermitt was at his parent’s home where his father kept his guns the day before the murder and then after the murder. Video from a car wash showing McDermitt washing the underside of his car after the killing on a day that it rained.
McDermitt admitted that downloading pictures of Fox from social media wasn’t appropriate. And that he lied to investigators when he said he had Fox’s phone only for a brief period of time. But he argued that his many texts to Fox went unanswered because Fox was “notoriously bad” at responding to messages.
He said after the phone incident he and Fox “went a couple of weeks without talking and then we were talking again” and then they had been “working on repairing things.”
Mankiewicz told him investigators believed McDermitt was angered when Fox caught off contact with him and that’s why he killed her.
“No, I was never angry at her. What would I have to be angry about her about? She did nothing wrong. I was the one that screwed up. Not her,” said McDermitt.
He also downplayed accusations by a female former FedEx coworker who told Dateline he had exhibited obsessive stalking behavior with her. McDermitt called that a “falling out” and a “stupid misunderstanding.”
He said that he was standing outside a window where that co-worker was having a counseling session because he had long frequented that location before she had been “forced to go to that counseling thing” and “I lived by there.”
McDermitt denied taking his father’s gun. He said his father never would allow anyone else, including McDermitt’s mother, to handle the guns.
Mankiewicz asked, “What made you want to wash your car that day?”
“Just the fact that I was going to go to my parent’s house. And I say my mom’s always on my butt for not cleaning my car,” McDermitt said.
He denied trying to hide mud from the murder scene.
“You’ve got to be like the unluckiest guy in America if you’re telling the truth,” Mankiewicz said.
What did others say about McDermitt case?
McDermitt’s trial attorney Ty Graham told Dateline that McDermitt was not threatening or menacing and not coming across as a danger to society. He pointed out that the traffic camera video did not prove the Ford Focus was his client’s. And that a bullet found in Fox’s car was so damaged, ballistics tests could not conclusively say if the bullet had been fired from McDermitt’s father’s .22-caliber gun.
The Dateline episode presented a whodunit mystery as Stark County sheriff’s investigators considered and ruled out multiple suspects before focusing on McDermitt, who was arrested on Nov. 4, 2020. The episode featured interviews with Fox’s aunt and stepsister and her coworkers at FedEx Ground, who talked about the devastation of losing Fox and her incredible kindness.
“I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that’s really how Morgan’s story ends,” Fox’s stepsister Cora Stonerock told Dateline. “I just don’t get it. I don’t get it. How somebody so pure is just gone.”
Interviews with Stark County sheriff’s detectives and Dennis Barr, the longtime chief of the Stark County prosecutor’s criminal division, were also featured in the episode along with videos of detectives questioning suspects.
A former FedEx female employee accused company management of not taking seriously enough Fox’s and the employee’s claims of harassment by McDermitt and other male employees and the theft of Fox’s phone. A FedEx manager warned McDermitt he would be fired if he took an employee’s phone again. But he was not suspended or fired for his behavior.
Craig Kennedy, who was a longtime detective for the Stark County sheriff who in 2025 became the Newcomerstown police chief, told Dateline that FedEx handed over all warehouse surveillance video detectives requested.
In 2023, FedEx reached a $4 million settlement with Fox’s family after it accused the company’s culture of having some responsibility for Fox’s death and staged a protest in 2021 outside the company’s Jackson Township location.
Dateline said FedEx issued a statement that said, “Our thoughts remain with the family and friends of Morgan Fox.”
Reach Robert at robert.wang@cantonrep.com.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Jason McDermitt denies on ‘Dateline NBC’ that he killed Morgan Fox
Reporting by Robert Wang, Canton Repository / The Repository
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