Algernon Cross, a 40-year-old Black man, was killed on the evening of February 12, 2016, after a brief stop along Bell Road in the Priest Lake area of Antioch. Just before 8 p.m., he was riding with a female relative when he spotted someone he recognized and asked her to pull into a parking lot in the 400 block of Bell Road. When officers arrived, they found him on the ground beside his vehicle, already dead.
Investigators later described the stop as part of a planned marijuana purchase. They said Cross got out of the car and began talking with people connected to a pickup truck in the lot, and in that moment he was shot in the head. Police said Cross’ teenage daughter was present and witnessed the killing, turning what might have been a quick errand into something that would follow her the rest of her life.
In the first days of the investigation, attention fixed on a man who was still there when officers pulled in. Police identified him as Jerome Sawyers, and said he refused to tell them what had happened. Instead, detectives accused him of moving through the scene like someone trying to erase it: they said he went through Cross’ pockets after the shooting, walked to a creek behind the parking lot, and threw something into the water. Police also said he left for a nearby gas station and then came back as officers were arriving, and they reported finding marijuana residue along the path they believed he took toward the creek. Sawyers was charged with evidence tampering, and police reported he posted a $30,000 bond.
Months later, the case took a sharper legal turn. Authorities announced that Latasha Starks had been indicted on a first-degree murder charge and arrested at her home in La Vergne, and that Sawyers had also been indicted for first-degree murder while already in federal custody in Arkansas. In public summaries of the investigation, police said Cross had been shot after conversing with two people in the pickup truck—alleged to have been Starks and Sawyers—during the attempted marijuana purchase in the Bell Road parking lot.
As the criminal case moved forward, Cross’ family was left to gather the pieces of a life that ended too abruptly. His obituary identified him as Algernon “Joe” R. Cross and named those who survived him, including his wife, Machelle Wynn Cross, along with children and a granddaughter, and it listed the Nashville-area services and burial that followed in the days after his death.
