Jury gives man 46 years in prison for murder, but finds he didn’t commit hate crime
A white man who made racial threats against his stepdaughter’s former boyfriend before showing up at the man’s house and fatally shooting his black roommate was sentenced to 46 years in prison Friday.
Kevin Ashley Parnell’s fatal shooting of 28-year-old Sammie Jones that 2017 Labor Day, however, were not a hate crime, the jury determined.
Parnell had been angry with Jones’ roommate, Jordan Briggs, who had previously dated Parnell’s step-daughter, when he went to the home in the 8000 block of Julie Avenue where the two men stayed on Sept. 4, 2017.
Parnell blamed Briggs, who is black, for pimping out his stepdaughter and giving her drugs.
Earlier in the day, Parnell had sent Briggs a series of racists messages through Facebook, calling him the n-word, threatening to hang him, and remarking, “I”m going to strip you naked and whip you like the slave you are.”
When he arrived at the house a couple of hours later and knocked on the front door, Briggs advised Jones not to answer it.
Jones did, however, and informed Parnell that Briggs was not home. Jones had tried to calm Parnell but the two got into a verbal exchange, leading to Parnell shooting Jones in the face at close range.
“The jury recognized the complete senselessness of this murder,” said Tracey Kapsidelis, who prosecuted the case along with Ryan Hill. “These are no longer the days of old, when disputes were settled in Hell’s Half Acre with a bullet.”
Parnell’s defense attorney, Dan Cleveland, had argued that Parnell, now 39, had acted under sudden passion when he shot Jones — a special circumstance that could have lowered the punishment Parnell faced from two to 20 years in prison. Jurors, however, also rejected that notion.
Cleveland said that the jury rejected the claim that the shooting was prompted primarily by Parnell’s bias or prejudice against African Americans was a relief to his client.
“That was his biggest concern because because he wasn’t a bigot. He’s not prejudiced,” Cleveland said Friday after the trial.
Cleveland said Parnell’s stepdaughter is bi-racial and Parnell had even previously allowed Briggs to live at his house. He said Parnell sent the racist remarks to Briggs as a personal attack after learning the man had allegedly been pimping out his stepdaughter and giving her drugs.
“He basically snapped,” Cleveland said. “What can I say to hurt that man as much as I possibly can so he went right to the race thing.”
Even if the jury had deemed the fatal shooting a hate crime, Parnell’s sentence could not have been enhanced.
“Although the finding would have had no legal effect on the penalty range for 1st degree felony Murder, prosecutors felt the evidence of a racial component was so compelling it must be included in the charges against Parnell in this case,” the district attorney’s office said in a news release Friday afternoon after the verdict.
But being deemed a hate crime could have made things tougher for Parnell in prison, Cleveland acknowledges.
He said Parnell is contrite for his actions.
“On the witness stand, the first thing he did was apologize to the Jones family, the decedent’s mother, and promised there wouldn’t be a day go by where he doesn’t remember Sammie Jones and he wants to use what happened as an example to others how not to handle conflicts.”
Parnell had plead guilty in the beginning of the trial to tampering with the evidence for disposing of the gun after the murder by throwing it into Lake Worth. Prosecutors say in addition to throwing the gun off an overpass, Parnell burned the clothes he had been wearing during the shooting and deleted many of the messages and postings he’d sent to Briggs.
The jury had deliberated about six hours before returning punishment in the case.
“I trust the people of Tarrant County and I think the jury worked really hard. Even if I may not agree with the sentence, I certainly accept it and I know Mr. Parnell does,” Cleveland said.
Most often, suspected hate crimes are prosecuted federally and not at the state level.
In recent years, the Department of Justice says its beefed up its hate crimes prosecution program and increased training to ensure prosecution of hate crimes. According a report released in October, the federal agency say it had charged 27 defendants in 22 cases and obtained 30 convictions in fiscal year 2018.
The District Attorney’s office does not keep statistics on the number of affirmative racial or bias findings made in Tarrant County cases but acknowledges they are rare.
In 2009, a Tarrant County jury found a then 66-year-old Arlington woman, Grace Edith Head, committed a hate crime when she hit a 34-year-old black neighbor with a wooden two-by-four board and jumped on her car. Head was found guilty of assault and criminal mischief in the case and sentenced to 180 days in jail and a $4,000 fine.
Head’s defense attorneys had argued Head was not guilty by reason of insanity.
FBI data shows Austin led the state in the number of reported hate crimes in 2017 with 18. Dallas came in second with 14 reported hate crimes and Fort Worth in third with 13 incidents.
This story was originally published February 15, 2019 at 4:59 PM with the headline "Jury gives man 46 years in prison for murder, but finds he didn’t commit hate crime."
