CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – As Day 2 came to a close in the jury trial for a young couple charged with first-degree murder in the death of a 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, the jury heard emotional testimony from family and witnesses who tried to help, and law enforcement with faulty bodycams.
On Dec. 8, 2021, at about 8:42 p.m., Clarksville Police responded to shots fired in the area of Buckshot Drive and Whitetail Drive. Upon arrival, they found 17-year-old Arahmonie Majors lying in the road, dead.
Later that evening, Robert Holland was arrested after a vehicle pursuit and foot chase through Lincoln Homes, and Miracle Bailey was arrested shortly after; both were only 18 at the time. Instagram messages later revealed that Bailey lured Majors out of his house, where her boyfriend, Holland, was waiting.
Here are five takeaways from testimony in the first two days of trial.
1. Audio from 911 calls brings witnesses to tears
On the night of the crime, as shots rang out through the once-quiet neighborhood of Whitetail Drive, 911 operators received approximately nine calls reporting shots fired and a vehicle fleeing the area.
At that moment, Lashonda Richardson was returning home from work when she narrowly avoided getting hit by a car speeding out of her neighborhood. As she drove down Whitetail, she noticed something in the road.
“I thought it was a dog at first,” Richardson testified, overwhelmed with emotion as she recalled the memory of that night. “When I drove past it, I looked in the rearview mirror and that’s when I saw the tennis shoes.”
Meanwhile, Josef Holler, an Army veteran, and his wife had just settled into bed to watch TV when the gunfire started and they saw a car speeding away. A moment later, a woman’s scream broke through the neighborhood, and Holler rushed out into the street. There, he found Richardson standing over the body of a teenage boy, screaming for help as she dialed 911.
When Holler took the stand, he listened to Richardson’s 911 audio, and be broke into tears as the audio of the traumatic night was relived in the courtroom, hearing himself shouting in the background and trying to help the victim. Richardson can be heard sobbing, “They shot him in the head! Oh God, I just stepped on a shell casing!”
“I was checking for a pulse and trying to keep people away,” Holler tearfully said. “Then I watched him … fade away.”
2. Defense argues eye witness or ear witness?
Of all the 911 calls and citizens who arrived on scene to help, the defense argued that no one really saw the crime being committed, only heard.
The defense argued that one witness reported seeing a white sedan, while others said it was a dark-colored sedan. However, the state’s key witnesses told the jury they definitively saw a dark-colored sedan and believed it to be a Jeep.
One key witness said that as the suspect vehicle sped past his house while he was standing outside his garage, he saw a person with blond hair in the passenger seat.
Later, after the pursuit ended in Lincoln Homes and Holland was in custody, police took Holler to identify the vehicle. He was able to identify it before he got out of the car, but the defense argued that police showed him no other vehicles, and all four doors to the SUV were open.
Erin Poland, defense attorney for Bailey, and Robert Koewler, defense attorney for Holland, doubled down that the witnesses may have heard the gunshots, but no one saw the crime being committed.
3. Muted bodycams and surveillance videos
In 2021, CPD had just introduced their officers and detectives to body cameras, and as many law enforcement witnesses testified, there was a bit of a learning curve.
Sarah Sager, a CPD officer, was the first officer to arrive that night and, after checking the vitals of the deceased, began establishing a perimeter to preserve the crime scene.
According to officers, the typical protocol for muting and unmuting their body cameras is to leave them unmuted while talking to witnesses and victims but to mute only when talking to other law enforcement.
For the 38 minutes that Officer Sager’s bodycam footage was running, 26 minutes were muted.
Likewise, Sgt. Nicholas Newman, a CPD detective with the Homicide Unit, also struggled with muting and unmuting the bodycam but was able to capture multiple conversations with witnesses, the victim’s family, and even with Holland once he was detained.
Detective Benjamin Goble, CPD homicide detective, observed footage taken off a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera through his bodycam. Although the quality was poor, and the crime itself wasn’t captured on camera, the audio was clear, and multiple gunshots could be heard. Unfortunately, no one returned to the neighbor’s house to retrieve the doorbell footage, and after seven days, the video from the night of the crime was automatically deleted.
4. Instagram’s digital footprint
CPD obtained four phones during the investigation: Two belonged to Holland, one belonged to Bailey, and the other to Majors.
The phone found on the crime scene where Majors was killed was actually a phone that he shared with his juvenile cousin, as he didn’t have a phone of his own. It was common that the cousins would share their phones with Majors, and on the night of the crime, he received a video call through Instagram.
Jalacia Johnson, one of Majors’ cousins, said while she, the juvenile cousin, and Majors were putting away groceries after returning from Food Lion, the cousin’s phone went off, and she observed Majors receiving a video chat on Instagram.
“I heard a girl say, ‘I see a yellow bus,'” Johnson told the court. He (Majors) went outside, and I was still putting groceries up. A couple minutes after he went outside, we heard gunshots.”
Johnson later provided detectives with Majors’ Instagram account, which was still logged in on her phone as well. Detective Goble observed message history between Majors and the last known account he had been communicating with.
Detectives Goble and Newman would later note that shortly after the crime, the account name had been changed and the ability to message the user was no longer available. Eventually, the account was identified as belonging to Bailey.
5. Where is ‘Seaberry?’
Former lead detective for the case Bryan Hughes took to the witness to explain the investigation findings to the jury. After Holland was detained, the stolen Jeep Cherokee was combed for evidence. A 9mm shell casing and 9mm magazine were recovered from the car, along with a backpack and water bottle.
The backpack contained a Biology schoolbook, a composition notebook, and several homework assignments with a name scribbled on the loose homework papers. Unfortunately, the first name wasn’t legible, but detectives could discern a last name: Seaberry.
Erin Poland, Bailey’s defense attorney, later pointed out that police took no action to investigate this third suspect, and Robert Koewler, Holland’s attorney, would capitalize on this.
“You didn’t investigate further the information that was inside of that backpack because the information you had at that point, it wasn’t important to the investigation,” Koewler told Hughes. “You had a name of a Mr. Seaberry and you didn’t follow that lead.”
Koewler went on to say that the opened water bottle found in the car was not tested for DNA, and despite having two other suspects at large, CPD did not investigate the water bottle or the last name found in the backpack further.
Michael Pugh, deputy district attorney, had Hughes explain this action.
“The vehicle was determined to be a stolen vehicle,” Hughes told the jury. “By virtue of that, other occupants could be known to have been in that vehicle.”
“Could one of the four people in that vehicle have stolen that backpack?” Pugh asked.
“Correct, or it could have been the other child of the vehicle owner,” Hughes agreed. He explained to the court that even after he left CPD, efforts to identify the two suspects never stopped. They had initially tried to find Seaberry by contacting Metro-Nashville to locate a student with that last name. Still, no answers would be found.
The trial continues Wednesday morning at the Montgomery County Courts Center.