Attorney urges jurors not to ‘guess guilty’ during deliberations for Lexington murder
A jury is out to decide whether a Lexington man is guilty of murder after a September 2022 shooting that left another man dead at a local apartment complex.
Jonathan Lockhart, 41, is on trial for murder this week for allegedly killing 51-year-old Raymond Brooks at an apartment complex in the 1700 block of Jennifer Road in September 2022.
The jury trial began Monday. Prosecutors said during opening statements Lockhart was the bystander to a nearby fight between other people when he suddenly pulled out a gun and fatally shot Brooks, also a bystander.
Lockhart’s attorney, Rawl Kazee, said the commonwealth’s case left “a whole lot of empty blanks.”
“The issue before you is whether or not the commonwealth was able to satisfy their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Kazee said Wednesday. “Circumstantial evidence does not mean you get to guess someone guilty and fill in the blanks because someone asked you to.”
But prosecutors contend their case is solid, and that Lockhart shot and killed Brooks suddenly.
Defense: Choice of witnesses is ‘curious’
Kazee told jurors that the whole first day of testimony, no one spoke much about Lockhart. Instead, testimony on the first day largely focused Rodriguez “Rod” Schooler, who was present at the time of the shooting and was allegedly part of the fight.
Testimony showed Schooler, Brooks, Lockhart and a woman named Odyssey Howard were in a hallway at the apartment complex before the shooting. Howard and Schooler were fighting when Lockhart suddenly shot and killed Brooks before fleeing the scene, prosecutors allege.
Howard testified that after the shooting, Lockhart began waving around his gun, saying, “Look what you all made me do.”
Kazee asserted that Howard’s claim of Lockhart waving a gun was not what she originally told investigators. Kazee said this claim arose months after the incident, when Howard was being threatened by investigators with a murder charge.
Howard adamantly denied this on the stand in court, and became enraged at the implication.
Another witness, Ashley Abrams, had a similar experience. Abrams was allegedly present at the time but not involved in the fight or the shooting. She initially gave little information about what she saw, but after she was in jail, she told officers she saw Lockhart shoot, according to court testimony.
Schooler was not presented as a witness despite being present at the altercation. Officers said they couldn’t locate him to have him testify.
“It’s awful curious that these are the only two people they brought you that they said fired the gun and killed Brooks,” Kazee said.
Kazee also said detectives failed to test several items of evidence, and said the evidence they did test did not point to Lockhart as the shooter. In earlier days of the trial, Kazee questioned whether School could have had gunshot reside on him after the incident. Testing showed he didn’t, but Kazee questioned if it was cleaned off.
Prosecution adamant Lockhart is guilty
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Katie Holt admitted their witnesses weren’t “nuns” and their case wasn’t perfect.
But no case is perfect, she said.
“There are missing pieces of the puzzle, but you are asked to fill in pieces of the puzzle with what evidence was presented,” Holt said. “The evidence we have answers who killed Raymond Brooks.”
Plainly, Holt said not one witness testified that anyone else committed the shooting except Lockhart.
Holt said there was no evidence that Schooler was the shooter, as implied by the defense, and he was cooperative with the police for their investigation.
Holt said it works out very conveniently that the defense would point to Schooler as the shooter because he was “the perfect scapegoat.”
“You shouldn’t guess (Lockhart) guilty, but you shouldn’t guess him not-guilty either,” Holt said.
Five days after the shooting, Lockhart was arrested for unrelated drug charges and housed in the Fayette County Detention Center. He was charged with Brooks’ murder in November.
