A Lafayette man’s defense team wrapped up their case in his murder trial on Wednesday.
Attorneys for 39-year-old Joshua Willis presented their two final witnesses Wednesday — an independent fire investigator and Willis’ sister.
Willis is accused in the deaths of 23-year-old Ashley Metz and 22-year-old Brouklynn Hill, who were separately shot and burned inside cars found in Scott and Carencro, respectively, in the early morning hours of June 21, 2016.
The 39-year-old faces a charge of first-degree murder in Metz’s death and second-degree murder in Hill’s. Prosecutors are not pursuing the death penalty on the first-degree murder charge.
Richard Jones, Jr., chief fire investigator with Forensic Investigations Group, testified that he was hired by the defense team to evaluate the origin and cause of the two car fires.
He said he concluded based on photos from the scenes, fire investigator reports and other provided evidence that the two fires were started in the vehicles’ interiors and an accelerant was used. Jones said the driver’s door of the Pontiac G6 where Metz was found was wide open, and two doors on the Nissan Altima where Hill was found were slightly ajar; that helped supply oxygen to keep the fires growing, he said.
Jones testified that based on surveillance video collected from a home on Patin Road, which neighbors Disett Road, the Nissan Altima that Hill’s body was found inside was set on fire at 12:25 a.m.
He said he based this judgment on the small globe of light that flared on the video at that time, which he concluded was when the fire ignited.
Prosecutor Alan Haney questioned whether the fire could have been started earlier in the night, smoldered and flared again with the introduction of more oxygen to the fire, like through the collapse of a car window from the heat. The question was based on testimony from Willis’s nephew, 29-year-old Joseph Sylvester, who was also accused of murder and took a plea deal in the case in July 2021.
An Acadiana Advocate reporter was not present for Sylvester’s testimony on April 22. Haney said Sylvester testified he was there when the fire started, before what was captured on camera.
Jones said it was possible — but in later defense questioning said his opinion that the fire had started at or about as 12:25 a.m. on June 21, 2016 remained the same.
Haney called Lafayette Fire Department investigator Alton Trahan to the stand as an expert witness to rebut Jones’s testimony. Trahan testified that the smoldering and reignited growth scenario could happen if the conditions were right, and that it’s possible the Disett Road fire began before the flare of light seen on video.
The final defense witness was Willis’s sister Roshella Willis, who is also Sylvester’s aunt.
Roshella Willis testified that she saw Sylvester and her brother on the Saturday before the killings at Sylvester’s mother’s house. She said she saw Sylvester argue with Hill, after Hill was showing another man a vehicle. She said she heard Sylvester tell his mother that Hill needed to go because he was inviting too many people into their business.
Willis’s sister said she saw Sylvester and Hill again at a party at her sister’s home the following day, Father’s Day, and that Hill drunkenly drove Metz’s car into her sister’s house while trying to move the vehicle. She also said she saw Joshua Willis the day before Metz and Hill’s deaths, and nothing seemed amiss.
Sylvester and a woman accompanied Roshella Willis and her husband to the beach and a casino in Lake Charles on June 21, 2016. They were there when they learned about Hill’s death, she said.
Roshella Willis testified that her nephew seemed “normal and fine” after learning about his friend’s death and like he had “no cares.” She said he paced around after insisting they maintain their plans to dine at L’Auberge Casino Resort instead of going straight back to Lafayette, and ignored repeated phone calls in the wake of Hill’s death.
“I looked at my husband and said, ‘Did Joseph do this? I know Joseph did,’ ” Roshella Willis said.
Willis’s defense attorneys also introduced about a dozen recorded jail calls Sylvester placed from the B.B. Rayburn Correctional Center as evidence.
On Monday, the defense called Sylvester back to the stand to question whether he had previously lied under oath about selling drugs while incarcerated following his 2021 plea deal. Sylvester invoked his 5th Amendment right in response to the questions.
The calls were played in court; the conversations could be difficult to discern, but at times Sylvester and the other men on the calls discussed things such as CashApp payments, needing someone to drive the route, needing 7 grams of something and an ounce of something else, and guaranteeing “it’ll all pay off.”
The final day of attorneys’ evidence presentation ended in tension between the prosecution and defense as defense attorney Kerry Cuccia moved for a mistrial over Haney’s questioning of Jones. Cuccia asserted it was prejudicial because Haney made it seem like the defense withheld information from Jones as he made his findings.
Fifteenth Judicial District Court Judge Laurie Hulin found Haney’s questions didn’t veer into being prejudicial and denied Cuccia’s motions.
