Trial of 2 men accused of robbery begins
The trial of Raquavious Leequon Driver, 18, and Jabrious Timion Smith, 18, continues today after the state works through 12 witnesses on Monday.
“These young men risked their lives for 200 bucks.”
Assistant Floyd County District Attorney Kay Ann Wetherington made the comment in her opening statement on the first day of a trial of two men accused of robbing John’s Grocery on Jan. 17.
“They’re barely but men,” Wetherington said of 18-year-old Raquavious Leequon Driver, 18-yearold Jabrious Timion Smith and the two other men who have pled guilty to charges linked to the robbery.
According to information presented in court:
Shortly after 4 p.m. on Jan. 17, Driver, Smith and 19-year-old Billy Kennedy Bell entered the store at 3218 Kingston Highway through a side door with their faces covered.
The store clerk Kristy Hughes and regular customer James Richardson had been chatting at the register. They told Richardson to get on the ground and Hughes testified that Driver pointed a pistol in her face and demanded cash.
Hughes handed the cash over while the robbers rummaged through Richardson’s front pants pockets. They stuffed the cash in a backpack Driver was holding, and the three men left through the same door they came in.
“That terrified me,” Richardson testified, adding that the memory stuck with him for weeks. “It’s like the worst bad dream you could ever dream of. I didn’t know if he was going to shoot me or not.”
After leaving, the three men scrambled up an embankment behind the store, heading back to a blue Dodge Dakota that Routledge parked on Sproull Road.
The men climbed in on the passenger side, said a witness, who was on her way home from work and thought it odd that the truck was parked where it was. She wrote down the tag number and handed it over to a retired police officer who lives behind the store and then called police with the information.
“This case came together very quickly,” Wetherington said.
They then traveled along backcountry roads through the Model area before dropping off Bell and Driver at an apartment at 301 Bert Road, where Driver’s grandmother lived and which is near Model High.
Routledge and Smith went to the high school and met another student who had given Smith his uncle’s pistol earlier that day.
This man testified that he didn’t know the gun was going to be used in a robbery. Robbing the store wasn’t the original plan, Wetherington said, they had originally planned to rob a drug dealer — and when that idea fell through they targeted the store.
Attorneys for Smith and Driver stated that they didn’t believe that the state had enough evidence to prove their clients robbed the store or were even there.
When Routledge took the stand, Smith’s attorney Sherri Stoney said he was pressured to provide names to law enforcement to get a deal.
“You had to come up with somebody,” she said. “Are you afraid to go to prison.”
“Not anymore,” he replied.
Routledge has pleaded guilty to a robbery charge but has not been sentenced yet, Wetherington said. Bell pled guilty to charges of armed robbery and aggravated assault and was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison on Friday. The trial is set to pick back up today at 9 a.m., with the state having two more witnesses to call.