Discrepancy in Bigsby murder trial
Sister: Codi was at his grandmother’s birthday party three months after prosecutors say he was killed
HAMPTON — Cory Jamar Bigsby called the Hampton police on Jan. 31, 2022.
“I think my son is missing,” he told an emergency 911 dispatcher.
Bigsby said he got up and went to his son Codi’s bedroom to get him — “and he wasn’t in there.”
“I have checked the entire house, closets and everything,”
Bigsby said on the call.
He told the dispatcher that Codi was 4 years old. “He was wearing black sweatpants, black socks, a black shirt,” Bigsbsy said, saying the boy’s black jacket and SpiderMan flip-flops were missing.
Bigsby’s lawyers played the 911 call to jurors as part of their defense in the murder case Monday.
Prosecutors contend that Bigsby killed Codi on June 18, 2021 — seven months before the phone call — and buried him in Maryland. Codi would have been 3 at the time.
The June 2021 date came from a statement found in a notebook in Bigsby’s belongings at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail while he was locked up on a series of child neglect charges.
Even as the boy’s body has not been found, Bigsby is on trial on charges of second-degree murder and concealing a dead body.
Bigsby’s sister, Tandaleyia
Butler, testified she saw Codi alive and well at his grandmother’s birthday party in September 2021 — three months after prosecutors say he was killed.
She saw him, she said, at her house in Washington, D.C., at the party for her mother. Her brother, she said, brought his four sons to the celebration.
Butler testified that she last came to Hampton to visit Bigsby and his sons at their Buckroe Beach home in 2020. When she learned the boy was missing, she said, she immediately left work and drove to Hampton to help look for him.
During cross-examination, Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Dylan Arnold questioned Butler’s assertion that she saw Codi in September of 2021, and played portions of two media interviews Butler gave. During an interview with local personality Rhoda Young on her Facebook
Live page Feb. 3, 2022 — four days after the boy was reported missing — Young asked Butler when she last saw “baby Codi.”
“Personally, I had not seen him,” she responded.
She testified Monday that she didn’t mean she had never met Codi in his life. “I meant that I hadn’t seen him in the (prior) couple months or so,” she testified. “I hadn’t seen him, but I had spoken to him.”
After her brother was charged with murder last year, Butler talked to the media outside Hampton Circuit Court after a mental competency hearing and said she saw Codi at the September 2021 birthday party.
“We have a trampoline, and they were doing what all the kids do, playing,” Butler told the media at the time. “And in December, a relative was at his house, and Codi was very much alive.”
Butler told the media that she was looking for pictures of the 2021 party that she said she would send to local media outlets — including the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot. But she never sent the pictures.
At the trial on Monday, Arnold asked Butler whether she has any pictures of Codi at that event.
“I can’t be sure that I do,” she testified.
After some back and forth on that, Arnold asked: “So you do not have any with you today?”
“No, I don’t.”
Also on Monday, the defense called Buckroe Beach resident Craig Andrews to the witness stand.
Andrews, a self-employed commercial insurance inspector, said he was shopping at a Food Lion grocery store on Nickerson Boulevard on Jan. 29, 2022 — two days before Bigsby reported Codi missing.
When Andrews saw the news reports a couple days later, he said he recognized the boy from the Food Lion.
He recalled that the boy was with a woman as he passed down one aisle, then saw them again on another aisle.
“It looked like he had a contagious personality,” Andrews testified. “He was happy go lucky” and waved at Andrews happily on both aisles.
Andrews said he reported the sighting to the Hampton police.
He talked to a detective, he said, but never heard anything back. A police detective testified earlier in the trial that all such leads were looked into but didn’t check out.
Prosecutors contend the Food Lion sighting was a different boy and that Andrews is mistaken.
On cross-examination, Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell showed Andrews a picture of Codi’s older brother and asked him if that was the boy he saw. Andrews said it looks like him, but he wasn’t totally sure. But when one of Bigsby’s attorneys showed Andrews a picture of Codi, Andrews was more positive.
“That’s him,” he said. “That’s the boy I saw.”
The defense also called Lt. Col. William Anderson, the assistant superintendent at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, as a witness. That jail is where Bigsby was locked up between his initial arrest on child neglect charges and his release on bond in June 2023.
“When Mr. Bigsby first arrived, he made frequent phone calls,” Anderson said. “As time went on it was less and less.”
He described an incident in June 2022 in which Bigsby was punching a hard glass door in the holding area.
Bigsby’s actions around that time caused Bigsby to be put on a suicide watch for 10 days.
That was about a year to the date to when prosecutors contend that Codi was killed and his body buried.
Anderson also said Bigsby was barely eating at the time, and would typically lie in his cell with a towel draped across his eyes, complaining of a headache.
“I was hearing that he was not eating the meals that were provided to him,” Anderson said. Bigsby came into the jail in early February 2022 at 233 pounds and weighed only 177 pounds that July — a loss of 56 pounds over five months.
Bigsby was sent to Norfolk Sentara General Hospital to be checked out, staying there for a night for a battery of tests. When he was given the physical all-clear and returned the next day, Anderson said he was trying to think of ways to get Bigsby to eat.
Anderson arranged to have Bigsby’s family come in to eat to eat with him, with the jail previously saying they catered in a lunch from Hardee’s, Bigsby’s favorite restaurant. “It seemed that he had lost hope,” he said, saying he was trying “to make sure he was taken care of.”
“We wanted to lift Mr. Bigsby up,” Anderson said.
Bigsby enjoyed the family visit, Anderson said, and he began to eat more.
Two days before the family’s visit, on Aug. 3, 2022, Bigsby stopped a jail guard to give the first of four statements he made.
Bigsby was put on suicide watch for a couple of days, then put back in the jail’s general population.
After the notebook with an incriminating statement was found on Christmas Day 2022, Bigsby was on suicide watch for nearly four months — until April 14, 2023. He was sent to Southern Virginia Mental Health Institute for two months, and was released on bond in June 2023.
On cross examination, Bell asked if Bigsby ever suffered “any torture at your facility.”
“No, sir,” Anderson said. Bell also asked if it’s unusual for inmates to be in a down mood.
“No sir,” Anderson said. “That’s where most of them are.”