Before a jury retired to deliberate Friday in Lowndes County Circuit Court, District Attorney Scott Colom culminated his closing argument by displaying a photo to the courtroom.
In it was a young girl, wearing a pink shirt, standing and smiling in the sunshine.
“When y’all think about Arykah White, this is how I want you to remember her,” Colom said as he held the photo. “… That’s the only thing I ask.”
It was a stark contrast to the first photo of White the jury was shown four days earlier — a 16-year-old lying dead at Propst Park with a bullet wound to her temple.
It took 90 minutes for the jury to return a guilty verdict in the weeklong trial, convicting Curtis Lathan, 20, of second-degree murder. He was charged with killing White with a stray bullet as she attended a birthday party at the park on July 20, 2019.
Judge Lee Coleman sentenced Lathan to 40 years in prison, the maximum term allowed by law.
As Coleman read the verdict, a whispered, “Yes,” could be heard from the slain teen’s family members sitting in the gallery.
Lathan was accused of killing White when he shot into a crowd at Propst Park after a fight broke out at the birthday party. He was arrested three days later.
The trial showed police officer body camera footage, as well as testimony from responding officers and other partygoers. While Lathan did not take the stand himself, the jury heard recordings of phone calls he placed from jail in which he tried to affect witness testimony.
“We were faced with a difficult situation of finding people that were willing to talk,” Assistant DA Benjamin Lang, who led the prosecution, said after the trial ended. “There was a big crowd there at Propst Park (the night White was killed), and we had an unusual circumstance where Curtis Lathan was actually tampering with witnesses from the jail, which made that even more challenging. … Those jail phone calls proved Curtis was the one telling two other individuals what to do, telling those two individuals that if they testify they were (to say they) nowhere near where the shooting took place. There were other things that Curtis had done like bleaching his hands.”
Rod Ray, who represented Lathan, couched the park scene as chaotic and built his case around there being no way to prove his client committed the murder.
“Our theory is that this was a chaotic situation, a situation where, understandably, people are freaking out because a child is dead at a birthday party,” Ray told The Dispatch on Monday. “Our theory is that they rushed to judgment to charge somebody to quell those fears.”
Two guns
Police never found the murder weapon but found two 9mm cartridges and seven .40-caliber cartridges at the scene.
A security guard admitted to police she had fired a Hi-Point 9mm handgun twice into the air and turned the gun over to investigators the night of the murder, according to witness testimony. The state Mississippi Forensics Lab determined, however, that White was killed by a .40-caliber handgun.
One witness testified that Lathan admitted to firing “in the air” at the party, and testimony also revealed that when officers went to Lathan’s house to speak with him, they found a .40-caliber magazine, though not a gun. They also saw Lathan had washed his hands and arms with bleach.
Calls from jail
Lang said the four witnesses who knew who shot the gun and rode home with Lathan were purposefully difficult, so the DA’s office began listening to the recorded jail calls.
“Lo and behold, Curtis Lathan is directing Quadrecious Gandy (with whom Lathan left the party) on how to tamper with these witnesses,” Lang said during his closing argument Friday. “Now this isn’t someone who is just prepping for trial, who is trying to get the truth out. This was a criminal mindset, someone that did not want the truth to get out and was influencing how these witnesses would be named and what they would say.”
Ray countered that Lathan, who was 17 at the time of his arrest, was scared and young and afraid the witnesses would be pressured not to tell the truth.
“He’s scared to death sitting in jail, and he’s reaching out to the only person he can reach out to and that he can trust,” Ray said. “He can say, ‘Hey, see what they’re going to say. My lawyer needs to know. I need to get my ducks in a row.’”
Colom offered a rebuttal that the calls were more than that, and Lathan was telling witnesses to lie or to go on vacation the week of the trial.
Lang, after the trial, offered condolences to the White family.
“First, we offer our condolences to Arykah’s family, but we are so happy with the result that they can get justice, and they did get justice,” Lang said.
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