Fort Worth capital murder trial: ‘You know how big a casket for a 5-year-old is?’
On a Sunday in August 2022, Anthony Bell-Johnson and Jay Nixon-Clark got out of a Chevrolet Equinox on a street in a new subdivision in far northwest Fort Worth.
They were there at midday to shoot Jamarrien Monroe because Bell-Johnson and Nixon-Clark believed that associates of Monroe had fired bullets upon a house in which Bell-Johnson’s relatives lived, according to a Fort Worth Police Department homicide detective.
Nixon-Clark would later tell the detective, Jerry Cedillo, that he left the SUV with a white Kriss Vector, a unique semiautomatic gun.
Also in the street outside the house where Monroe lived was Bell-Johnson, who is known as One Leg. Bell-Johnson uses a prosthetic limb after losing his leg as a child in a train accident. He once held the artificial limb and pretended to fire it in a fashion similar to the way in which police allege he handled the Draco, an AK-style pistol known as a chopper, from which he fired 7.62 rounds into Monroe’s house on Steel Dust Drive. The ejected cartridge casings of 15 such rounds were left in the street when Bell-Johnson was done.
On the day of the shooting, Nixon-Clark was 16 years and 9 months old, just shy of reaching legal status as an adult. Bell-Johnson was 21.
Monroe was in the garage. Its door was up, and the 17-year-old and four children who were also there were exposed to the shooters.
Nixon-Clark fired one round that was collected from a stairwell inside the house before the gun jammed, according to prosecutors. (In the final of several accounts he offered to detectives in an interview, Nixon-Clark admitted that, before it jammed, he fired one round when the gun was pointed toward the ground.)
After he was shot in the abdomen, Monroe ran from the garage to the laundry room and kitchen before he collapsed near the front door. The round transected an artery and Monroe left a trail of his blood on the floor as he moved through the house.
Monroe, who was pronounced dead at a hospital, was the target, but two children were also felled by gunfire.
Jamarrien Monroe’s 18-month-old son, Jhacari Monroe, was grazed in the leg.
Jamarrien Monroe’s cousin, Rayshard Scott, who was 5, was shot in the torso. He fell to the garage floor near the door leading to the interior of the house. He, too, would be pronounced dead at a hospital.
“You know how big a casket for a 5-year-old is?” Detective Cedillo would later ask Nixon-Clark in an interview, trying to jolt him into honesty. “It’s small.”
Nixon-Clark is the first of the two defendants in the case to go to trial on capital murder indictments. Nixon-Clark’s trial began on Monday, Jan. 6 in an auxiliary court in Tarrant County that was established last year to reduce a backlog of cases created when trials were halted during the coronavirus pandemic. Nixon-Clark was indicted under a statute that alleges he intentionally or knowingly caused the death of multiple people at the same time. Nixon-Clark was certified to be tried as an adult after the case was first filed in a juvenile court.
Under cross examination Detective Cedillo testified that a fingerprint on a door handle from the Chevrolet Equinox is among evidence that connects Tyreion Nixon-Clark, a brother of Jay Nixon-Clark, to the Steel Dust Drive scene. Bell-Johnson and Jay Nixon-Clark are the only suspects who law enforcement authorities allege fired shots in the case. Tyreion Nixon-Clark has not been indicted in the Steel Dust Drive homicides.
Two days after Jamarrien Monroe and his 5-year-old cousin were killed, police arrested Tyreion Nixon-Clark in connection with an unrelated homicide motivated by robbery in which the suspect arranged a meeting that the victim thought was to be a rifle sale, authorities said. Tyreion Nixon-Clark was in May 2024 convicted of aggravated robbery in the homicide of Deadrick Mason, a 17-year-old also known as Peanut.
Bell-Johnson and Jay Nixon-Clark sat in the parked Chevrolet Equinox for three minutes and 19 seconds before getting out and firing their guns at Monroe’s home, Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Melinda Hogan told the jury in the state’s opening statement.
In the interview with Cedillo and the case’s lead detective, Leah Dickerson, Jay Nixon-Clark first denied any involvement and suggested that Jamarrien Monroe was an acquaintance with whom he was on good terms.
Cedillo, who was familiar with Jay Nixon-Clark because of his work on the homicide in which Nixon-Clark’s brother was a suspect, pressed for more.
“Were you just sitting in the car, man?” Cedillo asked, minimizing his role in a tactic the detective hoped would make the teenager feel better about acknowledging the truth.
“Yes,” Nixon-Clark said.
He said that he was asleep in the back passenger seat of the Equinox during the shooting.
Finally Nixon-Clark admitted firing once after he had watched from the vehicle as a small boy (who must have been Jhacari Monroe) tottered from the garage to the driveway in a diaper.
Nixon-Clark was unable to clear his jammed weapon and could not fire again, he told police.
“Thank God for that,” Hogan told the jury in the state’s opening statement. Hogan is prosecuting the case with Assistant District Attorney Bill Vassar.
Detective Dickerson received a telephone tip that Nixon-Clark may be a suspect.
The state’s evidence has included the testimony of a latent fingerprint examiner who testified that a print lifted from an interior door handle in the stolen Equinox was Nixon-Clark’s. Prosecutors Vassar and Hogan also introduced to the jury evidence of location data police extracted from his cellphone and suggested there was an absence of location data at the time of the killings because the defendant had placed his phone in airplane mode.
Leon Haley, Nixon-Clark’s retained defense attorney, told the jury in his opening statement that he expected prosecutors would not call any witness who would testify that they saw Nixon-Clark at the Steel Dust Drive scene. In a hearing outside the presence of the jury, Haley sought to suppress a portion of the interview with Cedillo and Dickerson that continued after the defendant referred to a lawyer and asked to be taken home.
Nixon-Clark continued to talk.
Haley asserted that it was not reasonable to believe that his client thought he was free to leave the Homicide Unit office interview room, that he was not in custody or that his participation was voluntary.
A detective drove Nixon-Clark to his home after the interview, and a judge signed an arrest warrant for Nixon-Clark later in the day.
Judge Andy Porter denied the suppression motion, and the jury viewed and listened to the complete interview, in which Nixon-Clark admitted firing outside the house one round from the Kriss Vector. Judge Porter presided at one day of the trial. Justice Lee Gabriel has presided during the remainder of the trial.
Under Haley’s questioning, neighbors whose surveillance cameras recorded the shooting at a distance testified that they could not tell whether the people in the images were male or female, much less that one of them was Nixon-Clark. Fabric covered the shooters’ faces.
Nine months after the homicides, a Fort Worth Police Department Gang Unit officer documented Nixon-Clark as a Crip gang member.
Nixon-Clark and Bell-Johnson participated in a music video in which they point guns, reference gang affiliations and throw gang signs, according to prosecutors. The video was uploaded to YouTube in June 2022.
Cary Walker, now a Fort Worth Department Gun Violence Unit detective, was among the first patrol officers at the shooting scene, and prosecutors played a recording from his body-worn camera.
As he described, in response to a question from prosecutor Vassar, what he saw, Officer Walker stopped speaking.
“Sorry,” he said. “I think about this little boy a lot.”
Another state’s witness, Anthony Francisco, a rear neighbor of the residents of the house where the killings occurred, testified that he was napping with his pregnant wife in the living room when a bullet came through a fence, a window and over the bed in the master bedroom before it lodged in a wall.
Tiffany Daley, Rayshard Scott’s mother, recalled learning of the shooting while she was away from the house with a friend.
She went to Cook Children’s Medical Center and eventually saw her son with closed eyes on a gurney.
“I wanted to touch him,” Daley told the jury.
Prosecutor Hogan walked before the jury box holding a photo of the little boy that was taken on his first day of kindergarten, a few weeks before he was shot to death.
Nixon-Clark elected not to testify.
The jury was deliberating on Tuesday morning after receiving the case late on Monday afternoon.
This story was originally published January 11, 2025 at 1:58 PM.
