For three days, Karen Smith sat a few rows — maybe 25 feet — behind the two men accused of murdering her son.
She listened to 27 witnesses, viewed a seemingly endless slideshow of photographs and watched more than an hour of video evidence all relating to the events of March 26, 2023, when Jasiah Smith was killed just before 3 p.m. in a parking lot in the 400 block of Chadwick Court in Fredericksburg.
There were moments when, overcome by emotion, Smith left the courtroom momentarily. But she endured and remained until 6:17 p.m. on Thursday when word came that the jury had returned a verdict.
That jury — made up of six men and six women — deliberated for three hours before finding Aaron Carter and Lorenzo Brooks guilty of second-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
“I was hoping for first-degree, because that gives a long [sentence], and I don’t want to see these people out in the community, because I’m part of this community,” Smith said in an interview outside the courthouse immediately following the verdict.
Carter, 21, and Brooks, 18, will be sentenced on Sept. 25 and face a maximum of 40 years in prison on the murder charge.
“I wish that more people would’ve spoken,” said Smith, “because there were a lot of people out there, and if they would’ve had the firsthand eyewitnesses talk, they would’ve gotten a first-degree [conviction].”
After the Commonwealth rested its case on Thursday morning, defense attorneys Jim Ilejevich and Tara-Beth Coleman moved to strike the first-degree murder charges, removing the jury’s discretion in considering them. Presiding Judge Gordon F. Willis denied the motion.
The defense called just two witnesses, including Fredericksburg Police Det. Alex Tittle, who served as eyewitness Kerri Farr’s first contact with law enforcement.
In Farr’s initial statement to Tittle, offered in a phone interview a few hours after Smith was killed, she recounted witnessing “four boys standing over him shooting.” Ilejevich seized on that phrasing and how it changed over the course of subsequent hearings and during her testimony on Wednesday, when she said that she saw one boy “in tiny dreadlocks and a white hoodie,” raise his arm.
“I would say the Commonwealth had something to do with that, a little bit,” Ilejevich said of what he perceived as inconsistency in Farr’s testimony.
During closing arguments, Ilejevich also honed in on the firearm recovered from Smith’s body following the shooting. William Wallace, a neighbor who was among the first people to reach Smith, a former player on his AAU basketball team, testified that he picked up the weapon — a Glock 9mm handgun with an extended mag — and removed it for safety reasons. He carried the gun into his backyard, where he stored it in a pizza box until he could flag down a Fredericksburg Police Department detective a short time later.
“The Commonwealth doesn’t want you to pay attention to that,” Ilejevich said.
That gun, which was loaded with 28 rounds in a 31-round capacity mag, was analyzed by the Virginia Department of Forensics, whose firearms expert testified that it did not match any evidence recovered at the crime scene.
The same firearms analysis did, however, match two other Glocks recovered during a March 31 search warrant carried out at Brooks’ residence in the 700 block of Denton Circle.
“All 11 cartridge casings came out of those two guns,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Libby Humphries said during closing arguments.
Humphries compared the case’s circumstantial evidence to “Robinson Crusoe,” in which the titular character uses footprints in the sand to logically determine that he’s not alone on an island. She asked the jury to consider footage that showed Carter and Brooks starting from several hours before the shooting, when they appeared on camera at Manshue Check & Cash, to several minutes following it, when the two re-emerged shirtless from the Denton circle townhome and got into Carter’s white Chevrolet Impala.
“What we have here is an unbroken chain of events,” said Humphries, “an unbroken sequence of events.”
Following the verdict, Karen Smith thanked Humphries for lending a voice to Jasiah.
“He was a great, wonderful person who loved his mother,” she said. “He has family. He is wanted.”
Smith said she plans to attend sentencing, at which time she will be allowed to offer a victim impact statement. While that will likely conclude her formal role in the case, it’s not the end.
When Smith was leaving the courthouse on Tuesday evening, a sheriff’s deputy asked her, “Is it over?” in reference to the day’s proceedings.
“It’s never over,” she replied. “It’s forever. A young man lost his life, and I have to live with that.”
