East Ocean View fatal shooting trial starts

NORFOLK — Diandre Moss really, really, really doesn’t want to be in jail.

Not many people do, but Moss has made an extraordinary effort over the past two years to free himself. Charged with murder, he’s been locked up in the Norfolk jail since July 2019 when, by his own admission, he shot and killed a man in East Ocean View.

Ever since, Moss has tried to get a bond that would allow him to live outside the jail as his case worked its way through the court system. He’s filed some 20 motions to try to get judges to give him one, something most murder defendants do once or twice. When those failed before the judge in charge of his case, he tried the back door, writing to other judges — at least four. And for good measure, he filed six motions to throw out evidence or dismiss his case entirely.

In his motions and letters, Moss cc’d the the ACLU, the Virginia Supreme Court, Black Lives Matter, a member of Congress and a Norfolk City Council member. Nothing worked.

But now Moss is getting his chance. His trial for first-degree murder and using a gun illegally got underway Wednesday. If he’s acquitted, he may get to go home. If convicted, he could get a life sentence.

No one disputes that, just before 4 p.m. on July 25, 2019, Moss shot 40-year-old William Eric Brant in the 1900 block of 19th Bay Street, where both men lived. Prosecutors call the shooting death first-degree murder, while Moss and his lawyer say it was self-defense.

Prosecutor Shavaughn Banks said witnesses will testify

Brant was in a car with his family and friends that afternoon when Moss demanded he come over to Moss’ side of the street to talk. Brant obeyed. After the two men walked across the street, Moss went into his home while Brant waited “very calmly and ... very patiently on the front stoop,” Banks said. Moss emerged from his place and called over Brant.

When he did, Moss sucker-punched him, causing him to stumble backward, Banks said Wednesday during her opening statement.

“Pow! Then he does it again — pow!” she told jurors.

Moss chased him and just kept punching, Banks said. The two ended up a few feet away in a tiny, communal front yard. Moss continued to attack Brant, who kept retreating.

Finally, with his left hand, he pulled a gun from his waistband and shot him, Banks said.

“That one bullet tore up his insides,” she said.

Moss’ lawyer, Trevor Robinson, said the shooting had been in the making for awhile. A couple weeks earlier, several people assaulted Moss, forcing him to get “emergency treatment,” although Robinson didn’t say Brant was one of the attackers. And a couple days before, someone shot up Moss’ home, the defense lawyer added, promising to show jurors pictures of the bullet holes.

Finally, some 40 minutes before, a witness saw Brant steal something from Moss’ mailbox, which is why Moss wanted to talk to him in the first place. Once they started, Brant escalated things by making “threatening gestures” toward Moss and refusing to get off his property.

“I was attacked,” Moss wrote in an April, 15, 2020, motion. “I protected mine and my family’s life’s, nuthing more nuthing less.”

As part of his self-defense case, Moss and his lawyer will most likely bring up Brant’s autopsy results, which showed his blood alcohol content was 0.18 when he died, more than twice the legal limit to drive, according to a forensic scientist who tested his body fluids. He also had methamphetamine and cocaine in his system.

Banks said video showing most of what happened contradicts Moss’ story and self-defense claim — something she called “concoctions of (his) mind,” created in the nearly two years he’s been in jail.

“There is nothing in (Brant’s) hands,” she said. “There is no self-defense. All we see is aggression on the part of (Moss).”

Brant’s family and friends who witnessed what happened said that, after the shooting, he walked back across the street, holding his side, according to sworn affidavits of Norfolk homicide detectives. When he got closer, the witnesses noticed he was suffering from a gunshot wound and, when they looked across the street, they saw Moss with a gun. Then Moss bolted.

Brant’s friends loaded him up in a van and started to take him to the hospital, but an ambulance intercepted them on the way. Paramedics took him the rest of the way to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where he died. Brant had been shot in his abdomen, near the bottom of his left rib cage, according to the medical examiner who did his autopsy. The bullet hit his liver, stomach, pancreas and aorta.

Norfolk police tracked Moss to a house in Williamsburg using a cell number they got from Virginia State Police. He was arrested a day after the shooting.