SLO County couple whose son died in mysterious fall speak out on true-crime podcast
A San Luis Obispo County couple went on a true-crime podcast to talk about their late son years after their wrongful death lawsuit against the man they believe was involved in his death was dismissed.
Thomas Jodry was 21 years old when he died after falling from the third floor of the Marsh Street parking structure in San Luis Obispo in September 2019.
His death was originally ruled a suicide, but the Sheriff’s Office later changed its findings to show that his manner of death “could not be determined.”
In 2020, his parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against then 57-year-old David Allen Knight, who had been drinking with Jodry the night he died, but the charges were dismissed by a SLO County Superior Court judge in 2023. Criminal charges were never filed against Knight for Thomas’s death.
Bill and Mary Jane Jodry believe Knight had been grooming their son for months leading up to his death, a suspicion further confirmed to them when they later learned Knight had a previous conviction for molesting a child under 14 years old on a camping trip in 2003 that was later expunged.
The couple recently went on the True Crime Prevention Podcast to talk about their son’s story. Part one of a two-part series on Thomas Jodry, called “Drugged in Broad Daylight,” was released on April 23, with a second part to follow on May 7, Bill told The Tribune.
The solutions-based podcast explores real-life cases of grooming, scams and other preventable crime to educate the public on how to stay safe, according to the National Crime Prevention Council website.
“David Knight is the predator in this,” podcast host Paul DelPonte said on the episode, which is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Knight did not immediately respond to The Tribune’s request for comment.
How did Thomas Jodry meet David Knight?
Thomas Jodry met Knight in June 2019 while Jodry was selling cacti outside his house for his plant business, his parents said on the podcast. Knight apparently had found Thomas on Instagram, and came by the plant sale to comment on the photos of his online art, his parents said.
“These predators, they really do their homework,” Mary Jane said. “He studied Tommy, and he showed up at our house.”
The two began texting that summer, which his parents didn’t know about until much later. When they read the texts after Thomas’s death, his parents could see Knight was “grooming” him, Mary Jane said. Knight would call him “T-bone,” which had sexual connotations, she said.
Mary Jane said Knight would show Thomas clippings from art magazines claiming he owned the artwork and promising to use his non-existent connections in the Los Angeles art world to help the young artist.
“These people really get you,” Mary Jane said. “Whatever you say they, they’re the expert on that subject, and that’s usually how the grooming part starts.”
Knight was “creating the dependency,” where Thomas was reliant on him for success with his art, Bill said.
Eventually, Knight’s texts got more aggressive, pushing Thomas to meet up with him to “look at artwork,” Mary Jane said.
What happened the night of Thomas Jodry’s death?
The day of Sept. 14, 2019, Bill was home when Knight came by to pick up Thomas. He described the man as “curt” and “rude.”
Bill reluctantly let Thomas go with Knight, not knowing that would be the last time he saw his son alive.
The two were just supposed to go to Cal Poly to look at the architectural graveyard, but as time dragged on and Thomas still wasn’t home, Bill and Mary Jane became increasingly worried.
“They were supposed to be gone two and a half hours, and seven hours later they still weren’t home,” Bill said.
They didn’t know what happened that evening for a long time, but in the months and years after Thomas’s death, the couple pieced together a timeline and map of their son’s final steps.
Thomas’s cell phone data showed him at many different places that day: Montaña de Oro State Park — where Knight had “taken a few other victims,” Mary Jane said — Cal Poly, a Mexican restaurant and finally the Frog and Peach Pub for a drink.
According to Mary, Thomas was reluctant to go to the bar and had asked a friend to come pick him up before Knight convinced him to go drinking.
“Tommy felt kind of stuck,” she said.
Mary Jane said Knight ordered lots of alcohol, including double shots of tequila, and fed them all to her son. She said Thomas had the equivalent of 11 shots of liquor in an hour and 15 minutes, culminating in a blood alcohol content of 0.38 — four and a half times the legal limit to drive.
“You could be at death’s door at that level,” she said.
Phone records and security footage place Thomas and Knight in the bar together until 8:45 p.m. A witness then saw a young man matching Thomas’s description who appeared to be very drunk get into an altercation, face-plant into the street and run away from an older man, who would then calm the younger man down before he ran away again, The Tribune previously reported.
At the time, Knight told The Tribune he was chasing Jodry for the sole reason of calming him down. At some point, Thomas’s phone ended up with Knight. At the time, Knight said Jodry dropped his phone at some point while running away, so Knight picked it up and put it in his pocket.
According to the location data, Thomas’s phone arrived at the Marsh Street parking garage around 9:10 p.m., where his cell phone appeared to have lost its signal due to the concrete in the structure. It is unclear what happened in the following six minutes, but at 9:16 p.m. an ambulance was called when someone spotted Thomas on the ground outside the parking garage.
Also around 9:16 p.m., cell phone data showed Jodry’s phone leaving the structure and moving away from the scene, then returning to the parking structure at 9:25 p.m.
San Luis Obispo police body camera footage showed Knight identifying Jodry at the scene, but it was unclear what time this occurred.
“I don’t want to be on the record in knowing this guy,” Knight told the officer in the footage.
Knight later told investigators he wanted to be anonymous because he was afraid of being arrested for being intoxicated, according to the police report.
According to phone records, Knight texted Jodry, “Where are you?” at 9:27 p.m. — presumably after he identified Jodry to police and already had Jodry’s phone in his possession.
When asked why he texted Jodry when his phone was already in his possession, Knight told The Tribune he did not recall but was “probably in shock.”
‘He’s a sociopath’
Meanwhile, at home, Bill and Mary Jane were getting worried. Their son was supposed to be home hours ago. They called him countless times and left messages on his phone, the said on the podcast.
They didn’t know at the time that Thomas didn’t have his phone — Knight did.
Sometime after 10 p.m., the couple heard a knock on their door — it was Knight, dropping off their son’s phone, they said.
“This guy just gave us all this cockamamie story about, you know, that Tommy got really drunk and ... then he was running around downtown and acting crazy,” Mary Jane said.
She said Knight changed around much of the night’s timeline, which the Jodrys later determined by geolocating Thomas’s phone.
When they asked where their son was, he told them to call the hospital.
“I was in the living room with David Knight while Bill was making this call, and this guy was so creepy,” Mary Jane said.
As she learned what had happened to her son, Mary Jane said Knight was watching her with “the weirdest expression” on his face, like he was “fascinated by watching us go through a complete, total meltdown of learning that our son passed away.”
“Because he’s a sociopath,” Bill said.
