Photograph: Jemarcus McLendon
BOBBY ARDOIN
Editor/Consulting Writer
A trial jury is scheduled to begin deliberation inside 27th Judicial District Court Thursday morning in connection with a 2016 double homicide which occurred on a rural roadway in the Plaisance area.
Jurors listened for most of Wednesday to closing statements from both prosecutors and the defense attorney for Jemarcus McLendon, who has been charged with allegedly shooting 19-year-old Nakia Ramer and Shawn Parish, who died on his 21st birthday as they sat inside an automobile parked on Cosay Road.
Retired Judge Herman Clause, who has presided over a week of testimony, dismissed the sequestered jury Wednesday afternoon.
Rather than allow the jury to begin deliberation late Wednesday afternoon, Clause said he thought it more prudent to have the jury return on Thursday morning at 9 a.m. to receive instructions for deciding a verdict.
McLendon, according to court records, was arrested less than a month after the deaths of Parish and Ramer and charged with two counts of second degree murder.
Those charges were later upgraded to two counts of first degree murder in 2017, after the case was brought before a St. Landry Parish grand jury.
On Wednesday prosecutors Alisa Gothreaux and Donald Richard provided closing statements, while defense attorney Pride Doran presented his closing remarks before the midday recess.
Richard told jurors during his rebuttal statement that trial testimony showed that McLendon allegedly lured Ramer and Parish to the crime scene at around 4 a.m. on Sept. 24, 2016, with the intention of shooting them with an AK-47 assault rifle.
Mobile communication records Gothreaux and Richard said in their closing statements indicate that McLendon and Parish were in alleged contact with one another shortly before the murders occurred.
Gothreaux reminded the jurors in her closing statement that investigators at the crime scene uncovered numerous shell casings from the 7.62-caliber assault weapon, including a number of rounds that were found in the bodies of Parish and Ramer as they sat in their vehicles.
Doran said that the evidence presented by the prosecution was in his words, “circumstantial at best.”
The evidence said Doran, also does not point to McLendon as the perpetrator in the deaths of Ramer and Parish.
Doran attacked in his arguments the prosecution premise that the mobile phone mapping was significant and accurate enough in linking McLendon to the crime.
