Charles City — The Iowa Court of Appeals has upheld the murder conviction of a Waterloo man accused of killing a Grundy Center man following a botched drug deal in Charles City in 2017.
Prosecutors said Armando Adame III shot Michael Johns with a sawed-off shotgun on a rural Floyd County road after a quest for meth that took hundreds of miles — from Cedar Falls to Grundy Center to Marshalltown to Tama to Charles City — and countless hours only netted a package of ibuprofen.
On appeal, Adame argued jurors shouldn’t have heard about an earlier confrontation between Adame and Johns in which Adame pointed a sawed-off shotgun during an argument over a debt.
In that incident, a former girlfriend of Johns testified that in October 2017 she heard arguing, and Adame pointed the gun at her when she entered the room, saying “she can pay for you.”
Johns told Adame “she has nothing to do with this” and pushed the barrel of the shotgun away.
In upholding the conviction in a ruling filed on Wednesday, the Iowa Court of Appeals said the testimony was proper and relevant because it showed a “bad state of feeling” Adame had for Johns and because the weapon involved matched the murder weapon.
Johns was shot and killed Oct. 25, 2017, and his body wasn’t discovered until December 2017.
While Johns remained missing, investigators found Adame with a sawed-off shotgun when they searched a Waterloo home where he was staying.