Everyone,
Thank you for the help. After playing around a bit more I was able to figure out all my problem arose from the DC barrel Jack Adapter shown here:
I was under the impression that two of these pins were shorted with each other as ground. Apparently this is wrong. I changed up my wiring so I only used the back (+) pin and the pin protruding from the middle of the body as (ground) everything worked as expected.
I am still unsure how the third pin is suppose to work so if anyone could answer that just for future reference that would be great.
Thanks again.