Shanta Myers was a 36-year-old African American woman from Troy, New York, living in the Lansingburgh section of the city in a basement apartment on Second Avenue with her partner and children. In the days leading up to Christmas 2017, family and friends began to realize something was wrong when they couldn’t reach the household and normal routines abruptly went silent.
On December 26, 2017, a property manager who had been asked to check on the apartment went inside and found four people dead. Police described the scene as brutal and not something the responding officers would forget, saying it was not believed to be random. Investigators worked to determine a timeline and concluded the killings happened on December 21, five days before the bodies were discovered. Reports around the case said the victims had been bound before they were killed, and authorities treated the deaths as a targeted quadruple homicide that shook the region because two of the victims were young children.
The investigation quickly turned toward two men from Schenectady. On December 30, 2017, Troy police announced the arrests of James White and Justin Mann after bringing them in for questioning the night before. Both men were arraigned and initially faced top-level murder charges, including first-degree murder and multiple counts of second-degree murder, as detectives began piecing together how the suspects were connected to the victims and why they had gone to the apartment. Police said at the time that one of the defendants was acquainted with one of the victims, underscoring the belief that the attack was not random.
As the case moved through the courts, prosecutors tied the homicides to a burglary-and-robbery narrative: the men were accused of entering the home, stealing, and then killing everyone inside. A grand jury indictment and later court proceedings included burglary and robbery counts alongside murder charges, and prosecutors would later argue that evidence traced White from Schenectady to Troy and back again with the victims’ belongings. Over time, the paths of the two defendants split—Mann agreed to plead guilty to murder and accepted a negotiated sentence of 25 years to life, a deal that positioned him to testify as a key witness for the prosecution.
White chose a trial, and after weeks of testimony and exhibits, a jury convicted him in December 2021 on a sweeping list of charges that included multiple counts of first-degree murder, additional murder counts, and burglary and robbery-related offenses. In January 2022, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, with the district attorney’s office describing the case as a robbery followed by killings carried out with an expectation of getting away with it. With Mann serving his negotiated 25-years-to-life sentence and White ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison, the legal system treated the case as closed in terms of suspects—two arrests, two defendants, and convictions that marked the final turn from an unanswered Christmas-time horror into a resolved prosecution.
