WOMAN NABS 60 YEARS IN 2ND TRIAL FOR MURDER CASE

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

A Pine Bluff woman on trial for the second time in connection with the slaying of two people in 2006 was sentenced to 60 years in prison Wednesday after being found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder in Jefferson County Circuit Court.

Ymari Boyce-Reid, 22, had been charged with two counts of capital murder but after nearly five hours of deliberation, a jury of six women and six men found her guilty of the lesser charge.

Following the jury’s recommendation, Judge Berlin Jones sentenced Boyce-Reid to a total of 60 years in prison, 35 years for the death of Angela Hicks, and 25 years for the death of Christopher Allen.

Jones ordered the sentences to run consecutively, or one after the other. Because of a previous conviction for first-degree battery, a violent crime, Boyce-Reid will have to serve 100 percent of the sentence.

About midway through their deliberations Wednesday afternoon, jurors sent Jones a note, asking for copies of all the trial testimony.

After calling the panel into the courtroom, the judge explained that the only way that could be done would be for them to listen to recordings of the testimony from the court reporter.

“That would be in real time so it would take another day and-a-half,” Jones said. “That is the only format we could give you to allow you to hear all the testimony, but it would basically mean doing the trial all over again.”

He also indicated that written transcripts, which the jury foreman indicated some jurors had requested, could not be prepared that quickly.

“We don’t want to sit through the whole trial again,” said the female foreman before the panel returned to deliberations.

The bodies of Hicks, 36, and Allen, 30, were found in the front yard of a house at 3217 E. 4th Ave., in the Packingtown area on Jan. 16, 2006.

Boyce-Reid’s first trial in September ended in a mistrial when jurors, after deliberating about four hours, told Jones they were hopelessly deadlocked.

The defense had claimed that Angela Bell, 29, who was with Hicks, Allen and Boyce-Reid, did the shooting, but in both the first trial and again Monday, Bell denied those accusations, telling prosecutors she saw Boyce-Reid shoot Allen, then Hicks in the car they were riding.

Attorney John Kearney, who represented Boyce-Reid, also rejected a handwritten confession Boyce-Reid gave former police Lt. Marx Mitchell on Jan. 18, 2006, the same day she was arrested after she was found hiding in the trunk of a car in a garage in the Dollarway area.

During the time between the shooting and her arrest, Boyce-Reid claimed she was trying to raise money to hire a lawyer to surrender her to police during testimony in 2007 and when she took the stand Tuesday.

Prosecutors Rik Ramsey and Maxie Kizer, who represented the state, contended Boyce-Reid had been partying with Hicks, who was known on the street as “Pig,” Allen, also known as “Cuda,” and Bell “Angie” at the Economy Inn on Dollarway Road before driving to the house in the Packingtown area to buy marijuana at Boyce-Reid’s request.

In the handwritten confession, which Jones allowed into evidence despite the objections of Kearney, Boyce-Reid wrote that Allen tried to talk her into smoking powder (cocaine) and Hicks and Bell encouraged her to have group sex with all of them.

“We pulled up to what I thought was the weed (marijuana) and powder house and Cuda told me to strip and started trying to take off my clothes.”

“I felt my life was in danger, as well as my body, so when Cuda reached for his gun, I shot him in the head, then Pig started to go for the gun so I shot her two times,” Mitchell quoted Boyce-Reid as writing in the statement.

After the shooting, prosecutors said Boyce-Reid got in the car, which had been rented by Hicks’ mother, and drove to a house in the Broadmoor area where she cleaned up and changed clothes, then got a ride to the house in Dollarway where she burned the clothes she had been wearing, as well as a Glock .45-caliber handgun.

A spring which Ruben Linden, a firearms and tool marks examiner at the Arkansas Crime Lab at Little Rock, testified appeared to be the spring from a Glock model firearm was recovered in a burn barrel behind the house in the Dollarway area, and a slide and barrel from a Glock handgun that had been burned were found in another location.

The previous incident that resulted in the five-year prison sentence for Boyce-Reid stemmed from an incident Dec. 16, 2005, when she and Melvin Ricky Sanders Jr., 28, of Pine Bluff, were accused of breaking into a house in the 600 block of West 29th Avenue and beating a woman with heavy glass candle holders after the woman’s boyfriend allegedly said something about Sanders while being held at the old county detention center.

Sanders is serving a 12-year sentence at the Varner Unit in connection with that incident.