'The Worst Type Of Evil': Life Sentence For November 2022 Murder

Aaron Davis had just aced the GCSE exam and called his parents to let them know how excited he was and that he was going to visit his best friend in Rome before going to see his girlfriend in Alabama.

He was infamous for his loud shirts, had a flair for making people feel good and a love for his family that didn’t know any bounds. Teaching was a profession that the recent graduate was excited about, although he was still considering a career in law.

Either way, his future was a bright one.

“Aaron had worked too hard to be where he was that day,” his father, Randy Davis, said. “He had just come home and was so excited.”

Aaron and his girlfriend, Charliegirl Schellenger, talked about getting married and having kids. Between his jovial nature and love of life, he’d have been a good dad. He really wanted to have a daughter and experience the life of a girl dad, she said.

“Because of a man he called his best friend, who surely would have been one of his groomsmen, that will never happen,” she told the judge.

For no truly discernible reason, that person Aaron considered to be his best friend, Brandon Risner, was going to murder him.

Risner had fantasized about killing Aaron for some time, Floyd County Assistant District Attorney Leah Mayo said. On Nov. 10, 2022, when Aaron showed up at his home, he’d already come up with a plan.

They were both Mormons, but Risner had taken to drinking and brought Aaron — who was normally a teetotaler — out for a night in downtown Rome. They’d hit a couple of bars and brought home a bottle of wine.

It was around 9:57 p.m. when Aaron sent his last text to his girlfriend.

The answer to the question of why someone considered to be his best friend chose to murder him remains a murky one. Testimonies suggest it may have been undiagnosed mental health issues exacerbated by a fascination with serial killers and movie-fueled murder fantasies.

“I believe Brandon carefully planned Aaron’s murder,” Aaron’s mom, Sandy Davis, told the court. She recalled the calculating way Risner suggested that maybe Aaron was suicidal when she caught him in a lie before his arrest. “I’ve cooked and served Brandon thousands of dinners over the years... He was all the while planning to murder my son while I was cooking for him, taking him out to eat, taking him to the fair.”

She described what Risner did, how he’d gone about it, and what it has since done to their family as “the worst kind of evil.”

Questions

Risner himself sought to answer some of those questions, which had gone unanswered during the police investigation, during a mental evaluation presented to the court.

“There were some things only he could tell us, since he’s the only surviving person who was there,” Mayo said.

Risner told the mental evaluator later that, while taking edibles and smoking marijuana, he felt prophecies from God had been revealed to him. He would need to either kill Aaron or have sex with his stepmother. In another version, Risner said that he feared Aaron would kill his younger siblings, and in another he needed to kill Aaron in order to get Aaron’s sister to come back from a mission trip.

Risner had invited him to stay at his parents’ Collinwood Road home while they were away, Mayo said. All part of his plan.

That night after his uncharacteristic drinking bout, Aaron had passed out in the guest room. Risner grabbed a kitchen knife and climbed on the roof outside of the guest bedroom window and waited.

“I became a carnal animal, like in a dream,” Risner told the forensic psychologist.

Creeping into the room from the window, Risner stalked his prey and began to stab him. Normally in an attack, there are defensive wounds as a person fights for their life.

“Aaron didn’t have any defensive wounds... He didn’t see this coming,” Mayo said.

Describing it as a process that “felt like forever,” Risner stabbed the person who’d considered him to be his best friend 40 times. “Suddenly it didn’t feel like God’s will, it felt like pure evil,” he told the psychologist.

But that didn’t stop him from working to cover up the crime, Mayo told the judge. Remorse wasn’t a factor.

The next day, on Nov. 11, Risner began cleaning up the house and communicating with Aaron’s family and girlfriend, saying that he hadn’t seen him. He went and bought some duct tape from Walmart to wrap up Aaron’s body and began searching the internet for replacement sheets and bedding — the others were now saturated with blood.

They were concerned, especially when — that Saturday, on Nov. 12 — Rome police found Aaron’s car dumped at Heritage Park with blood in the back seat.

After the murder, Risner made what appears to be a fairly innocuous to-do list until the circumstances are considered.

To do:

Schedule three last songsVacuumLaundryShower in my showerTake Bath

Risner also began writing song lyrics; music was a pretty big part of his life.

“His scream became a gargle as he swallowed his own tongue,” Risner wrote.

He also made some notes about plans for the future. He considered applying to go to Brigham Young University — Hawaii and making some auditions.

“He’s still making plans for his future at a time when he has just permanently ended Aaron’s life,” Mayo told the court.

Sentencing

Floyd County Superior Court Chief Judge John “Jack” Niedrach considered the issue Thursday during a sentencing hearing for Risner. He’d pleaded guilty to malice murder and other charges earlier and now there was only one question left — life in prison with the possibility of parole or life without parole.

For the former, the defendant would spend at least 30 years in prison before being considered for parole. For the latter, he’d never get out.

Risner’s parents, including his father who’d convinced him to turn himself in, asked Niedrach to take mercy on their son.

The case has only shown the crimes their son has committed, not the beautiful soul that they’ve loved all his life, he said.

“What they’ll never see is the joy he brought into our lives when he was born,” the defendant’s father, Jeromy Risner, told the judge. He, alongside Risner’s mother, talked about their concerns regarding undiagnosed mental health issues their son has had and feelings of alienation that he’d suffered from.

“My child is a kind and loving human being who suffers from a mental illness... I still have a hard time believing Brandon could do this,” his mother told the judge. But, she added, “Brandon is where he needs to be right now. He caused devastating pain to the Davis family.”

Whether it was that mental illness or something else that led him along the path to murdering a friend, Risner had not shown any remorse, Mayo said to the judge.

The night of Nov. 12, 2022, after Risner had fled from police who came to investigate his home, his father and stepmother had found him and picked him up. They told police they’d bring him in and where to find Aaron’s body — in the hole left by an overturned tree off Tumlin Drive in the Old East Rome neighborhood.

“His stepmother recalled that on the way to Tumlin Drive, Brandon was singing along with the radio like nothing was wrong,” Mayo said.

Judge Niedrach, before passing down the sentence, addressed the Davis and Risner families.

“Both of these young men have been loved throughout their lives. I know all of you are in tremendous pain. To have a young son brutally murdered is unfathomable,” the judge said.

But, he told those attending the hearing, there’s only one option for the circumstances presented in this case. He sentenced Risner to serve the rest of his life in prison without parole. Quietly, before he left the bench, Niedrach said that the sentence passed would speak for itself.