Defense shifts blame to witness in slaying
Transgender woman shot to death during brawl in Midtown
A Channelview man testified Tuesday he watched his close friend fatally shoot a transgender woman during a brawl on a Houston street that left two people dead.
The witness, Rique Jackson, 24, said his testimony implicating his friend Tariq Lackings was motivated by a desire to set the record straight about the slaying of transgender woman Shante Issac.
Lackings, 32, is on trial in the fatal shooting of Issac on a corner in Midtown where two groups met to settle an earlier confrontation in a fast-food restaurant.
But defense attorneys for Lackings quickly turned the tables on Jackson, accusing him of being a killer who was lying because he brought a knife to what he thought was a cocaine buy. Lackings at one time was also charged in the death of 33-year-old Willie Sims during the same street fight.
And, defense attorney Paul Morgan said, the drug deal went bad.
“On April 10, 2016, you were the person who brought the knife, weren’t you?” Morgan shouted at Jackson. “You cut Shante with a four-inch blade. Then Willie came at you with a tire iron and you cut him. He fell backwards and you stabbed him in the liver.”
“No,” he responded.
A new dimension to crime
The dramatic cross-examinaton of Jackson added a new dimension to accounts of the slaying, painting it as mutual combat between two rival groups that bought and sold drugs among themselves. Morgan noted that Jackson had been facing a 10-year prison sentence for the felony offense of choking his mother, but after cooperating in Lackings’ prosecution he ended up serving six months on a misdemeanor charge.
Prosecutors immediately countered that Lackings, who lives in Galena Park, sold crack cocaine for a living.
If found guilty of murder, he faces life in prison in the fatal shooting of Isaac, 34.
Jackson told the jurors that Lackings and a different transgender woman apparently got into a confrontation with Isaac and her friends at a McDonald’s days before the melee.
On the night of the brawl, Jackson testified that he was staying with Lackings, who woke him up, then drove to pick up his friend and two men to try to settle the score with Isaac.
The found Isaac with Willie Sims, 33, at the intersection of Fannin and Dennis about 11:15 p.m. that night. Lackings and his four friends parked and got makeshift maces — boards with screws in them — and a crowbar out of the trunk, Jackson said.
Jackson told jurors they confronted Isaac and Sims, and Isaac threw a bottle at the group. Then someone in Jackson’s group picked up a brick, and Isaac and Sims were beaten.
“They tried to fight back, but there was no chance,” Jackson said. He said Isaac was trying to get away from the beating. “The person who got shot was trying to run away.”
During a stiff cross-examination, Morgan tried to establish that Jackson had just been released from drug rehabilitation and was looking for cocaine.
“You were needing a fix and fiending that night,” Morgan said. Jackson said he was not.
Examining text messages
Earlier in the day, jurors were shown a string of text messages between Jackson and Lackings that appeared to show a grisly plan.
“I wanna get powered up and cut (someone’s) finger off,” read the phone message from Jackson to Lackings in the hours before the fight.
Jackson said he was “just talking mess” about a coworker, indicating that it was just a joke.
Prosecutors Jennifer Meriwether and Aaron Chapman put on testimony about the string of text messages as a way to show that Lackings was at the brawl that erupted and knew there could be violence.
Attorney Morgan said the prosecution is mistaken about what happened and that Houston police have charged the wrong man in the shooting.
In court, he pointed to the inflammatory texts as proof that other people, not Lackings, were responsible.
Lackings was originally charged with capital murder in both deaths, but prosecutors later reduced the charge to murder in only the death of Isaac.
Since the crimes occurred, witnesses have told police that the two groups of people had a history of confrontations. Friends and family said the incident probably sprang from some sort of dispute between Isaac and one of her attackers, another transgender woman, over a man.
Lackings, who remains in the Harris County Jail on $250,000 bail, is being tried in visiting state District Judge Reagan Clark’s court. Closing arguments could happen Wednesday, according to the judge.
If Lackings is convicted, the punishment phase would take the rest of the week.