Angel Mullooly, 34, was charged with second-degree murder, while Cory Young, 44, and his wife, 37-year-old Shannon Young, are accused of hindering the investigation, according to the Phoenix Police Department. The trio was arrested in connection with the Aug. 27 killing of Jake Kelly, in which police said Kelly was assaulted and left unresponsive in his driveway.
According to Jan Kelly, Jake's mother, Cory and Shannon Young were sharing a house with her son near Cave Creek Road and Union Hills Drive when he was attacked.
Kelly told Phoenix New Times that Shannon Young called her sometime after the assault to tell her Jake was hurt. Young claimed she and Cory found Jake outside their home, beaten to a pulp.
Kelly said the Youngs then took her son inside, gave him a bath — supposedly to “revive him” — and waited until Aug. 28 — the next day — before taking him to a hospital.
“They put him in the bathtub and tried to make him come to,” Kelly said. “And he wouldn't come to. So, they took him back out of the bathtub, took his wet clothes off, put dry clothes on him and took him to the emergency room.”
Kelly, who lives in Texas, flew to Phoenix to be with her son after she learned of the attack.
Kelly’s face was “completely pulverized” and had to be put back together by surgeons. Large gashes went down his arms, a “piece of his bowel had died,” and after yet another surgery, he contracted sepsis and went into a coma, according to his mother.
“And then he wasn't there anymore,” she said. “So, I just had them unplug him.” Kelly died from his injuries on Sept. 8, police said.
Jan Kelly said her son was gay. He officiated at the marriage ceremony of Shannon and Cory in March, according to photos on Cory Young's Facebook page. The photos show Kelly presiding over the backyard ceremony and signing the marriage certificate.
In those same photos, Cory Young is wearing a T-shirt featuring Thor’s hammer, an Odinist symbol used by neo-Nazis and mainstream pagans alike. The shirt is emblazoned with “Hung like a heathen"
Cory Young once worked for Wolfskin Ink, a tattoo parlor owned by Jubal Dean Perkins, an ex-con and tattoo artist profiled by New Times in October 2016. The story, “21st Century Viking,” detailed Perkins’ life, murder and a circle of pagan Odinists, worshippers of the Norse religion Asatru, that Perkins had collected about him.
New Times interviewed Cory Young at the time, who was upfront about his nearly 13 years in prison for aggravated assault and armed robbery. He claimed to have put his career as a criminal and his time in prison as a skinhead behind him. A Nazi swastika was inked in the center of his chest, but he said he mostly kept it covered up with a shirt. Other neo-Nazi tattoos cover his body.
“I was running with a lot of skinheads and the Aryan Brotherhood and stuff like that,” Young said in 2016 about his time in prison. He claimed neo-Nazism was “a dead cause” but admitted to having some of the same views as he did in prison.
Jake Kelly was beaten and left in the driveway of his north Phoenix home on Aug. 27. He died from his injuries on Sept. 8.
Courtesy Jan Kelly
‘His body just started falling apart’
How did Kelly come to inhabit the same space as an ex-con with a Nazi swastika on his chest?His mother, who spoke with her son regularly, said Kelly was Shannon Young’s housemate before Shannon met Cory, who moved into the house with them. Jan Kelly knew about the wedding and that her son had performed it “after he got an online thing (that) made it legal for him to marry people.” But she knew nothing about Cory Young’s status as an ex-con.
She described her son as a docile and kind man who worked at a local pizza joint. He would not have fought back, she said.
“The hospital told me that when he came in, he was talking, but they couldn't understand what he was saying,” Kelly said.
“But he was afraid. And they just kept telling him, ‘You're safe. You're in the hospital. Nobody's going to hurt you. We're going to take care of you.’ And he finally started calming down, and then his body just started falling apart," she added.
Jan Kelly said Mullooly lived “not far from the house that Shannon and Jake rented" and knew her son and Shannon Young. They were all friends before Cory Young moved in, she added.
But once Cory Young entered the scene, Mullooly “got squirrelly,” Jan Kelly said. A friend of her son’s told her that Cory Young and Mullooly “just got blind drunk and just got started and couldn't quit.”
Kelly said she’s staying in the Phoenix area with a friend of her son’s until the end of the criminal case against the trio. She said she has no sympathy for Shannon, who first informed her that Jake had been hurt.
“She could have called for an ambulance at any time during all of that, and she did not. Instead, she let him lay there and suffer all broken up like that," Kelly said.
She thanked Phoenix police for making the arrests. She also thanked Matt Browning, a former Mesa police officer and expert on racist skinheads, for his involvement in the investigation.
Browning is the author of "The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy," which details his police work involving neo-Nazis in the Valley.
Browning told New Times that despite Cory Young’s claims, he was just “a wannabe AB,” referring to the notorious white supremacist prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood. Rather, Young was a “neo-Nazi skinhead,” Browning confirmed. “One hundred percent," he said.
