Major Wendell Carter III, a 30-year-old man, was killed on October 27, 2014, after a nighttime trip to the Village Apartments in Port Allen turned a small-time marijuana purchase into a sudden ambush. The encounter began as a favor: Ashton E. Taylor asked Carter to help him buy marijuana, and the two went together to the apartment complex to meet a seller.
What should have been a quick exchange instead drifted into a stairwell and tightened into a trap, the kind of moment where a few steps and a few words decide everything.
According to the later court record, the buyer and Carter approached the person they were there to meet, with Taylor handing over a bag for the marijuana. Before the transaction could finish, the man abruptly demanded they “Give it up,” and gunfire followed. Carter was shot in the back, a wound that perforated his lungs and proved fatal. Taylor was also shot—wounded but alive—and in the aftermath he told investigators what happened and later picked Javonte T. Morgan out of a photographic lineup as the shooter.
Port Allen police—Chief Esdron Brown and Detective Shane Weems—worked the case, tracing phone activity and tracking Morgan down at his mother’s residence. In a recorded interview after being advised of his rights, Morgan acknowledged being at the scene that night but denied involvement in the shooting. After his arrest, he asked to speak with police again and pointed to Ronald A. Nolan as a possible shooter, an accusation that would become part of the dispute that played out in court. The evidence battles were messy and human: arguments about whether a frightened witness had been influenced by the idea that police already “had someone,” and whether the darkness and stress of the attack could have led to a mistaken identification.
Ultimately, the case produced an arrest, a jury trial, and convictions. Morgan was found guilty on four counts: second degree murder, attempted second degree murder, armed robbery, and attempted armed robbery. The trial court imposed life imprisonment at hard labor on the murder count; fifty years on the attempted murder count to run concurrently with the life sentence; fifty years on the armed robbery count to run consecutively to the first two counts; and forty-eight years on the attempted armed robbery count to run concurrently with the other sentences. The court of appeal affirmed the convictions and sentences, leaving the fatal shooting at the Village Apartments not as an unsolved story whispered through a neighborhood, but as a case with a named defendant and a final judgment on the books.
