Capital murder trial for accused Arlington Lamar High School shooter begins Monday
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Lamar High School shooting
Our continued coverage of the school shooting at Arlington’s Lamar High School on March 20, 2023.
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The trial of a 15-year-old accused of capital murder in the fatal shooting of a fellow student outside Lamar High School in Arlington will began Monday with jury selection.
Opening statements in the trial may take place later Monday or Tuesday morning after the jurors are chosen.
The teen’s lawyers questioned if he would be able to sit through the trial, which was originally scheduled to begin the week of Aug. 21, and Tarrant County Juvenile Court Judge Alex Kim ordered that the teen undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
In the evaluation, the teen was found competent to stand trial.
The 15-year-old is accused of killing 16-year-old Ja’Shawn Poirier on the steps of Lamar High School on March 20 and wounding another student.
In June, Kim denied a request from the prosecutors to try the accused shooter in adult criminal court.
After he was taken into custody, the accused shooter told a juvenile services employee that he fired upon the victims when he saw a person who appeared to look like a boy who raped him in October inside a bathroom at the school, Tarrant County Assistant Criminal District Attorney Lloyd Whelchel said at a hearing in June.
Whelchel told Kim the sexual assault accusation was false and concocted by the suspect in an attempt to justify what the prosecutor said is the most heinous of offenses.
Earlier in the hearing, Whelchel asked Arlington police homicide unit Detective Krystallyne Robinson whether Poirier, who died when buckshot severed the 16-year-old’s brain stem, had sexually assaulted the suspect in his killing.
“No, sir,” the detective testified. Indeed, Robinson said, there is no indication the respondent, as the accused is known in juvenile legal matters, knew Poirier, who moved to Arlington from Michigan at the beginning of the school year.
The father of the 15-year-old was sentenced earlier this month to more than six years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. The 50-year-old man, who the Star-Telegram is not naming so as not to identify the juvenile, pleaded guilty to the charge in May. Court documents say the father was charged with illegal possession of the Mossberg 500 shotgun his son used in the fatal shooting.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram generally does not publish the names of juveniles who are accused of crimes, unless they are charged as adults.
This story was originally published September 16, 2023 at 11:37 AM.
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