Mothers of victim and killer testify, call for justice in Lamar High School shooting trial

Rashone Jacob still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that her 16-year-old son, Ja’Shawn Poirier is dead, she told the jury Wednesday morning in the trial to sentence his killer.

She still has all his things, packed now in her garage. When she returned from burying him next to her mother in Pontiac, Michigan, she was stunned by the number of people who turned up at a memorial service for him at Lamar High School in Arlington, the school where he was shot on March 20.

“My son was just a laid-back kid, who stayed to himself and loved to play sports and hang out with his family and friends,” Jacob told the jurors.

Jacob moved with her son and daughter to Arlington months before a 15-year-old student with a shotgun opened fire on a crowd outside the school, killing Poirier and wounding a female student. The shooter, who is not being named because he was convicted as a juvenile, has pleaded guilty to capital murder and attempted capital murder. The jury in Tarrant County Juvenile Court will decide his sentence from a range of no punishment to a maximum of 40 years.

Jacob’s son made good grades in Michigan and was doing the same in Arlington, she testified Wednesday. He’d looked forward to playing football at Lamar High School, but because of when they arrived in Texas he was told he’d have to wait until the next school year, which would have been his senior year.

She was at work when she got a call from her cousin, telling her the school was trying to get in touch with her. That cousin told her that Poirier had been shot.

“All I can remember is just screaming, crying and calling my boss and telling her I have to leave,” Jacob said.

She tried to get to the school, but traffic was too heavy. Eventually, she ended up at the hospital where she was told her son was in surgery. She didn’t get to see him again before doctors told her Poirier had died.

Jacob said that while she has her daughter and cousins living in North Texas close to her, it’s felt like she has been processing the loss of her son by herself.

She wanted the jury to know that her son was the kind of person who made friends easily, despite being a quiet teenager who typically tried to keep to himself. He was loving and just wanted to spend as much time as he could with his family and friends and never did anything to hurt others, she said.

The rest of the family is still struggling with Poirier’s death, too, Jacob said. Her daughter was the one who dropped Poirier off at school that morning.

“It impacted her hard because she was the last person who saw him who dropped him off at school,” Jacob said. “They went skating that Sunday and then on Monday it happened.”

The mother of the teenager who shot and killed Poirier also testified Wednesday, telling jurors that she knew her son well and had a good relationship with him, something the teen’s defense attorneys have disputed.

The jury was shown images of text messages from the shooter’s mother on March 9 in which she talks to him about being suspended, which attorneys for the state suggested proves she was not an “absentee mother,” as Assistant Criminal District Attorney Lloyd Whelchel put it.

His mother also told the jury she called the detention center regularly to check on her son and only didn’t drive to visit him because it was seven hours from her home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Fort Worth and she wasn’t certain he would see her.

The mother told the jurors she was in regular contact with her son before his arrest, saying they sent between 30 and 40 texts back and forth every day. She said she kept in touch with him while he was in the juvenile detention center, calling regularly to check on him when she was told he didn’t want to call her.

“This is my child and even though I love him, accountability has to be given,” his mother told the jury.

Defense attorney Lisa Herrick argued during questioning that the teen’s mother wasn’t a good parent, a reason the defense said in opening statements Tuesday that the jury should show the teen some leniency.

Herrick pointed out that the shooter’s mother withheld from previous testimony information about one of her children, her oldest daughter, saying she had three children when she has four.

The mother told the jury her older son was recently released from prison after a conviction on drug and vehicle theft charges.

The mother also told the jury that before her son who is on trial moved to Texas to live with his father in 2018, the teen lived in a home with regular arguments, fights, violence and visits to the home by local police. His father has now been convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and sentenced to over six years in federal prison because authorities said the shotgun their son used in the shooting came from his home.

The mother said she didn’t know about the fight in October that led to her son’s suspension from Lamar High School, testifying that she only knew about a fight he had at some earlier time in 2022. She testified she didn’t know about his problems with attendance at school until he told her he had in-school suspension on March 9.

The teen’s mother also said she didn’t believe her son’s account about being sexually assaulted in a school bathroom in October. After his arrest, her son told police that he opened fire toward a crowd of students outside the school after he thought he recognized one of the classmates who had assaulted him. The mother told the jury in response to a question from the prosecution that she hadn’t noticed any changes in her son since the date he said he’d been sexually assaulted.

In response to a question from the defense, the teen’s mother said she hadn’t seen her son in person since before the date of the alleged sexual assault.

Prosecutors began the trial’s second day on Wednesday by introducing evidence they say shows the teen immediately began sending messages following the shooting in an attempt to create an alibi for himself.

The prosecution presented text messages police said were sent by the shooter before he was arrested. In those messages, he texted at least two people to say that he had too many tardies at school and had detention but he wasn’t going.

In another text message, the teen told a family member that somebody was shooting at the school.

“CALL THE POLICE THER SHOOTING AT MU SCHOOL,” the message said.

That message was sent at 6:58 a.m., two minutes after the teen has admitted he opened fire.

The family member sent several messages after that, asking if he made it home, asking him to call her and questioning why he wasn’t answering his phone.

The teen entered the courtroom Wednesday wearing civilian clothing after the day before opting to wear his khaki, jail-provided uniform against advice of the court.

The prosecution called the teen’s probation officer to the witness stand, during which he confirmed that the choice to wear his jail uniform on Tuesday was something the teen made a conscious decision to do

Attorneys for the state told Juvenile Court Judge Alex Kim before the jury was brought into the courtroom Wednesday morning that the prosecution had seven more witnesses.

In opening statements Tuesday, the defense said it intended to seek leniency for the teen with a promise that attorneys would call experts to talk about the brain development of a juvenile, impulsivity, the way a minor evaluates potential actions and consequences, and explore the possibilities of rehabilitation.

Frank Adler, co-counsel for the teen’s defense, told the jury that the defense would not be asking for the minimum sentence of no disposition, or zero punishment, but would be asking for less than the maximum of 40 years.

The prosecution, known as the petitioner in juvenile court, told the jury it would seek that highest penalty, saying that the state would show through video, photos and witness testimony that the teen not only committed the crime at his Arlington school but then immediately began trying to create an alibi.

In the first day of testimony, the jury heard from a surviving victim, police officers, a psychologist and investigators. Attorneys on both sides of the case sparred in the courtroom over the validity of the sexual assault allegation the shooter made after he was arrested.

A detective with Arlington police who investigates crimes against children told the jury that she at one point believed the report the teen made because of the details he provided but that she no longer does.

A psychological evaluation shared with jurors may have created more questions than answers, as the psychologist Monica Jeter said that the teen’s personality evaluation indicated he was being defensive and the results should be taken with some measure of caution.

The evaluation indicated that the shooter was a moderate risk for future violent crime, had below average sophistication, above average maturity and had strained relations with his parents.

On Tuesday morning, jurors were told that he was found and arrested shortly after firing a shotgun into a crowd of around 20 students waiting to enter the high school, and dropped a backpack that contained the shotgun he used as well as unused buckshot shells when he ran from police.

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