photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Benjamin Mims appears with public defender Jessica Glendening on Wednesday, July 9, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

Faced with the possibility of decades behind bars, a young drug dealer agreed to testify against an innocent man to save himself. That’s what defense attorneys intend to tell jurors Thursday as they deliver closing arguments in the case of Benjamin Mims, who is accused in the fentanyl death of a Lawrence teenager.

But the state will offer a far different version of events that led to the death of 18-year-old Mohamadi Tompson Issa Jr. on Aug. 28, 2021. According to the prosecution, Mims, 37, was a major drug dealer who provided the deadly fentanyl to the young drug dealer, Logan Hastie Morgan, who in turn sold it to Issa. The favorable plea deal and sentencing for Morgan — just over three years vs. 20 — was in the service of taking a much “bigger fish,” Mims, out of circulation.

Douglas County Deputy District Attorney David Greenwald and public defenders Jessica Glendening and Allyson Monson are scheduled to make their closing arguments Thursday morning after two days of a trial that included as much legal wrangling over evidentiary issues outside the jury’s presence as live testimony in front of it.

Morgan, a 25-year-old prisoner at Winfield Correctional Facility, was expected to testify at length Tuesday but abruptly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as the Journal-World reported — ostensibly because the testimony against Mims that he agreed to as part of his plea deal could have opened him up to federal and other state charges.

Because Morgan was then deemed unavailable to testify, his testimony from Mims’ preliminary hearing was read, with litigated redactions, into the court record by Judge Amy Hanley on Wednesday.

That testimony, 40 pages read over about 45 minutes and over the defense’s objections, included Morgan saying that he met Issa in 2021 through a mutual friend who was also a drug addict. Morgan indicated that he and Issa helped each other get drugs, including “blues,” a slang term for fentanyl.

“I sold him the one he OD’d on,” Morgan says in the transcript read by Hanley, in which he refers to Mims as “my dealer,” “my guy” and “my dude,” although he also indicates that he got drugs from other people as well, noting that he had a $200-per-day drug addiction and couldn’t go more than six hours “without railing a pill.” The addiction, he says, “put holes” in his brain and negatively affected his memory.

The day before Issa overdosed, however, Morgan says he bought around a dozen pills from Mims, and later gave two to Issa, whose body was found with part of a bluish-green pill in a baggie and a straw for snorting, according to former Lawrence Police Detective Charles Cottengim, who testified later Wednesday.

“My dude wants me to franchise,” Morgan says in the transcript, referring to Mims, who Morgan says wanted him to “move” 100 to 200 pills a week.

Greenwald argued that the relationship and agreements between Morgan and Mims constituted a conspiracy to distribute fentanyl, one of the charges that Mims is facing along with a distribution charge and the more serious charge of distributing a controlled substance causing death.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Former Lawrence Police Detective Charles Cottengim testifies at the trial of Benjamin Mims on Wednesday, July 9, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

The state’s last witness was Cottengim, who testified that he believed, based on phone and text records, that Issa bought fentanyl from Morgan. When he interviewed Morgan weeks after Issa’s death, he asked who his source was and was told it was “Slim,” a contact in Morgan’s phone, who Cottengim eventually understood to be Mims.

“I believed Mr. Mims was the source of fentanyl that caused (Issa’s) death,” he testified Wednesday, citing a meeting that he said took place in downtown Lawrence between Mims and Morgan. Surveillance cameras helped him identify what he said was Mims and Mims’ car. He also later obtained a search warrant for Mims’ phone.

As they had in their opening argument, the defense team attacked Cottengim’s investigative work as too narrow after he quickly settled on Mims as the “big fish” he wanted. In order to get him, they said, he expressed a willingness to go easy on Morgan if Morgan delivered the catch — an observation that Cottengim owned, telling the jury that it made sense for community safety to take advantage of a dealer lower on the “food chain” to take out one higher up.

Glendening asked Hanley to acquit Mims, saying the state had not produced sufficient evidence to put the case before a jury and arguing that distribution of fentanyl was “not a crime supported by the law” in 2021, the year Issa died. Glendening argued that fentanyl was an “opioid,” not an “opiate” as described in state statute at the time. Hanley rejected those arguments.

Mims declined to take the stand in his own defense. His attorneys called just one witness, Morgan, who appeared on the stand for a matter of seconds to answer Glendening’s single question about how much time he faced before cutting a plea deal with the state.

“Roughly 20 years,” he said, before walking out of the courtroom in ankle chains.

Mims, a convicted drug dealer, is facing a jury after withdrawing his guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter in Issa’s death. He learned that he would be facing around 20 years in prison after his true criminal history score — the highest possible — came to light instead of the six to eight years that his then-attorney, Dakota Loomis, and Greenwald had contemplated based on incomplete information.

According to court records, Mims was convicted in connection with three cases in Wyandotte County in 2004 of two felony counts of aggravated robbery, two felony counts of theft and one felony count of burglary. He was sentenced to juvenile custody until he was 22 years old and was placed on probation after his sentence until he was 23. He failed to comply with that probation and eventually served another six months in custody of juvenile services until he aged out of the system.

Mims was on federal parole at the time of Issa’s overdose. He was convicted in 2019 in federal court of felony possession with the intent to distribute heroin. Mims was also convicted in 2009 for felony possession of narcotics in Douglas County.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Benjamin Mims appears with public defender Allyson Monson on Wednesday, July 9, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.