Do you know who killed Joseph Simmons? Joseph “Jenain” Simmons was a 37-year-old Black man from Laredo, Texas, whose life ended in a burst of violence far from home, on a stretch of Chester Street in Alexandria, Louisiana. What began as a single gunshot moment hardened into a case that would linger in the courts, reshaped by charging decisions and delays that stretched the wait for answers.
In September 2014, authorities charged Mark Russell Thomas, 33, of Alexandria with manslaughter in connection with Simmons’
shooting death. Police initially treated the killing as first-degree murder, but when the case moved forward by bill of information in early September, the accusation against Thomas was reduced to manslaughter. The shift changed the legal framing of what happened on Chester Street, but it didn’t erase the central claim: that Simmons was shot and killed, and that prosecutors believed Thomas bore criminal responsibility for the death.
As the case unfolded, a second defendant was pulled into the same fatal night. Shamantha Wayn Boyd, 46, an Alexandria woman, was also charged with manslaughter in the death of Simmons. With two people facing the same level of charge, the story widened from a single defendant’s fate to a paired set of trials—two paths through the same tragedy, each with its own court calendar and its own slow crawl toward resolution.
By the summer of 2016, the matter still had not reached a jury. Thomas, identified as an Alexandria man among those indicted in the broader “Triple M Murder Team” investigation, obtained a continuance, pushing his manslaughter trial date to Aug. 23. Boyd’s trial was set later, for Oct. 10. The public record available here does not provide a verdict, conviction, or dismissal; instead, it captures the case in mid-motion—charges filed, allegations fixed, and the weight of a man’s death still hanging over a courtroom schedule that kept sliding into the future.
