Dalontay Edmond-Geiger Sr. in an encounter with police, left, and during an interrogation, right (Cleveland Police Department).
“I’m crazy to you?”
These were the words asked by an incredulous-sounding Dalontay R. Edmond-Geiger as police questioned the Ohio man about the alleged kidnapping, zip-tying, beating, stabbing, and sealing of a woman into a small black plastic storage container.
In meandering answers from his May 3, 2023, interrogation, he insisted he was working as a confidential informant for a detective, and admitted that yes, he did put the woman in what a detective called a “box.”
“Long story short, if I wanted to kill her, she would’ve been dead. Facts,” he said. “I beat her up. I fed her. Showered her. All type of weird s—. Made sure she ate. But I just could not let her go back on the streets, and tell everybody that I was working for y’all. I couldn’t.”
The interview included him telling officers that he faced three previous attempts on his own life. Unprompted, he showed them parts of his own body, including his rear end.
“I’ve been shot in my a–,” he said.
During the interrogation footage, Edmond-Geiger repeated that if he wanted to, he could have killed her and disposed of the body.
“If the b—- was going to be dead, the b—- would have been dead in the lake by now,” he said. “Y’all would’ve never found her. I had more than enough time to do it.”
Police body camera footage from the prior day shows him stonewalling police after they showed up to answer a report that the woman was in the basement. Officers told him that their body cameras were on.
“Can you please turn the cameras off?” he said.
After he stonewalled them at length, they said they would return with a search warrant.
In interrogation footage, Edmond-Geiger said the woman had been upstairs at the time of this first police encounter. Officers have said that they found her under the porch in the plastic container.
“Edmond-Geiger admitted to physically assaulting [the] victim, ziptying [sic] her hands to a chair, and moving her body from room to room to deceive police,” the affidavit stated. “Geiger then forcefully stuffs [the] victim’s body into a 3 ft x 3 ft plastic container and traps her motionless body inside and seals the lid, restricting air to victim before police finds victim.”
Edmond-Geiger is currently serving 16 to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including kidnapping. The woman survived the torture.
“I’ve never seen an offense like this in my time on the bench,” Common Pleas Court Judge Hollie Lauren Gallagher, noting that she had been a judge for nearly 20 years, according to Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC in November 2023. “I’ve had hundreds of kidnappings, probably hundreds of felonious assaults, never have I seen anything of this magnitude.”
Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
