By Michael Copley, Staff Writer
mcopley@powhatantoday.com

There is outrage in the community at the verdict returned in the Parrish cousins’ murder trial, after they were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of 18-year-old Powhatan High School student Tahliek Taliaferro.

And the anger and disappointment was on full display last Sunday, as hundreds of people gathered for a peaceful protest outside the Powhatan County courthouse.

Charges that racism played a part in the jury’s decision surfaced just moments after the verdict was delivered last week.

But does decrying the verdict as racist too casually reduce a set of complicated circumstances? Could there have been other elements, moments during court testimony that could have shaped the jury’s decision that had nothing to do with race? Could inconsistent testimony and the inevitable struggle to define reasonable doubt (see right) have brought us to this point?

We don’t have to condone the events of June 24 to weigh the evidence in court objectively, to try and understand how we got here.

How significant was the BB gun pistol in the victims’ car?

At 6:45 p.m. June 24, Powhatan Deputy Ron Gatti responded to the Loch Gate Subdivision, the first officer on the scene after a report of a possible shooting.

When Gatti arrived, Tahliek Taliaferro was dead in the front seat of Lawrence Harris’ Saturn and “a gun was between the victim’s feet,” said Gatti. The deputy testified that he picked up the pistol, realized it was a loaded BB gun, and placed it on the roof of Harris’ car. Then he turned his attention to the victim.

Powhatan Detective Jason Tackett arrived at the Loch Gate crime scene at 6:51 p.m. June 24. There he found an unloaded pistol BB gun in the trunk of Harris’ car. Tackett told the court he questioned all law enforcement officers and emergency medical personnel about the movement of the BB gun, but no one could say how the gun got from the roof of Harris’ car to the trunk. Subsequent lab testing returned no latent finger prints on the gun, not even those of Deputy Gatti, who handled the BB gun bare-handed that night.

Lawrence Harris told the court he did not see the gun on June 24 until Deputy Gatti pulled it out from under Taliaferro’s seat. Under cross examination, Harris repeated that Gatti retrieved the gun from under Taliaferros’s seat and that he did not see anyone in possession of the gun on June 24.

Courtney Jones testified that he hadn’t known the BB pistol was in the car and that he saw no one in possession of a pistol.

Defense attorney Craig Cooley was incredulous.

“If the gun wasn’t used, why was it at Tahliek’s feet?” he asked the jury. “It follows common sense.”

At a preliminary hearing in August, before authorities released information about the gun found in Harris’ car, Stephanie Reynolds testified she saw something black in the driver’s hand, but couldn’t say for sure it was a gun.

And from the stand, Ethan Parrish testified that he shot six times when “[Lawrence Harris] leaned back and pointed a hand gun directly at me.”

“The pistol was at Tahliek’s feet, not under the seat,” pushed defense attorney Ted Bruns in closing argument. “The question is whether Ethan had reasonable cause to do what he did.”

Inconsistencies in testimony may have cast doubt

Taliaferro was shot after a verbal altercation at Sheetz on Route 60. It was noted and uncontested that Joey Parrish directed Taliaferro and his friends to follow him for a fight, but an explanation of the subsequent actions taken by Taliaferro and his friends was hard to pin down from testimony.

Lawrence Harris told the court he and his friends briefly finished their ice cream and got in their cars to go home. He said he followed the path of the Durango through the Sheetz parking lot to talk to a friend, Ashton Bradbury.

But Bradbury testified that she saw Harris and tried flagging him down to warn him about the guns in Joey’s car, but she said Harris didn’t stop.

“I didn’t want a confrontation to happen when Joey had guns,” said Bradbury.

At a preliminary hearing in August, Courtney Jones said the group stayed and ate ice cream for an hour after the confrontation, and only left to play basketball.

But his story differed on the stand during trial and the defense honed in on the inconsistency.

For reasons never made clear, Taliaferro and his friends made a U-turn and headed back east on Route 60, eventually following the path of the Durango down Dorset Road. Courtney Jones said on multiple occasions that Taliaferro stated he wanted to “go find Joey to fight,” but Lawrence Harris said he made the U-turn because one of his passengers needed to go to his grandmother’s house on Dorset Road.

There were also questions about the manner in which Harris’ Saturn passed the Durango, now parked on Dorset Road.

During the trial, Harris and Jones said they slowed to about 35 mph as they passed the Parrish cousins, but at an August hearing, Courtney Jones said they slowed to a “creep.” When pushed at trial, he conceded that they passed at a very slow roll. Stephanie Reynolds confirmed under defense cross examination that the Saturn passed behind the Durango at a slow roll, just faster than a walk, she said.

The detail may seem small, but it makes up the fabric of evidence the jury had to confront.

There were inconsistencies in defense testimony also, but the jury seemed swayed by Ethan Parrish’s testimony. He said he had in fact retrieved and loaded the MAK 90 before finding out the other boys were known to carry guns.

And Parrish refuted Reynold’s claim that he tried exiting the vehicle at Sheetz with a gun.

But it appeared the jury gave Ethan Parrish’s testimony more weight than they did the often stumbling accounts of Commonwealth’s witnesses.

And after four days and layers of testimony and evidence, the jury was asked to render a decision with unwavering obedience to specific instructions handed down by the court (see box, below).

And so the jury rattled past second degree murder (murder in the absence of premeditation) and past voluntary manslaughter (a killing in the absence of malice) and settled on involuntary manslaughter, finding the Commonwealth failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that “the killing resulted from an intentional act committed in the heat of passion,” but that the Commonwealth did prove a killing happened. That killing, they decided, though unintended, “was the direct result of an unlawful, but not felonious, act, accompanied by carelessness so gross and wanton and culpable as to show callous disregard for human life.”