The defense on Tuesday began to present its case to the jury in a Lafayette murder trial.
Joshua Willis, 39, of Lafayette, is accused of killing 23-year-old Ashley Metz and 22-year-old Brouklynn Hill in the early morning hours of June 21, 2016. Both were shot and burned inside separate cars in Scott and Carencro, respectively.
Willis faces a first-degree murder charge in Metz’s death and a second-degree murder charge in Hill’s. Prosecutors are not pursuing the death penalty as part of the first-degree murder charge.
Willis’s nephew, 29-year-old Joseph Sylvester, was also charged in Metz and Hill’s deaths and took a plea deal in the case in 2021. Sylvester testified against Willis earlier in the trial, in exchange for a possible sentence reduction.
Hill’s defense attorneys, Sean Collins and Cody Brown, put on evidence from three witnesses Tuesday.
Josh Guy, a Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office employee, testified that he assisted with the murder investigations as a member of the agency’s criminal intelligence unit. He collected video surveillance footage from a home in the 200 block of Patin Road. Patin Road connects to Disett Road, where Hill’s body was found.
The video footage was grainy and poor quality, but Guy testified a glowing light caught on the camera appeared to be the car fire. The fire started around 12:24 a.m. The camera quality wasn’t good enough to capture any images of who set the fire, he said.
Eric Grabski, a senior digital forensic examiner with Envista Forensics, testified he was hired by the defense to review call detail records in the case.
He looked at what cell towers were pinged as Sylvester and Willis used their phones between 12 a.m. and 12:40 a.m. on June 21. After mapping the activity, Grabski testified that in his opinion the two men could not have been at the Disett Road scene at the time of Hill’s murder.
The defense also used Grabski’s testimony to challenge the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office’s use of another type of phone record to gauge people’s locations in the case.
Grabski, a former agent with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, testified that network event location system reports, developed by AT&T to estimate cell phone’s locations and help assess coverage weak spots, can be useful for real-time crime fighting but aren’t reliable for assessing past whereabouts. NELOS records were used by LPSO in their investigation.
The third witness, Kevin Williams of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, confirmed he performed a data extraction on Sylvester’s phone. Williams’s report was submitted as evidence.
The seventh day of trial was recessed early over a conflict about a report from the defense’s fourth witness of the day, Richard Jones, Jr. Jones is a fire investigator and co-owner of Forensic Investigations Group in Covington; he was hired as an expert witness by the defense.
Prosecutor Alan Haney argued that a report Jones produced wasn’t provided to the prosecution before the trial, only a summary of his findings, which put prosecutors at a disadvantage.
Defense attorney Cody Brown stated the report was provided to the defense team in March, after discovery deadlines, and so they chose to limit the scope of questions to the summary, while attorney Sean Collins argued the defense team also felt they were only required to produce the summary since Jones’s testimony would be limited to that.
Fifteenth Judicial District Court Judge Laurie Hulin, who’s presiding over the trial, ordered the defense to give a copy of the report to prosecutors and recessed trial around 2:40 p.m. to give prosecutors a chance to review the report. The trial will resume Wednesday at 8:30 a.m.
