Shanise Myers, a 5-year-old African American girl, was killed in Troy, New York, in what authorities later described as a targeted, knife-attack massacre that wiped out nearly everyone inside a basement apartment in the Lansingburgh section of the city. Investigators said the attack happened the night of December 21, 2017, behind the closed door of the family’s home on Second Avenue, where Shanise lived alongside her mother, her brother, and her mother’s partner.
For days, there was only silence. Relatives grew worried when calls and messages went unanswered, and eventually a property manager went to check on the apartment. On December 26, the property manager discovered four bodies inside—Shanise, her mother Shanta Myers, her brother Jeremiah “JJ” Myers, and Brandi Mells. Reports from the early investigation described the victims as bound and their throats cut, a scene that stunned even veteran investigators and left the neighborhood reeling in the days after Christmas.
Within the week, police announced arrests: Justin C. Mann and James W. White, both from Schenectady. Prosecutors alleged the two men carried out the killings together, and the case moved quickly into court, where authorities said the crime had occurred days before the bodies were found. A grand jury later indicted the pair, and both men faced top-level murder charges tied to all four deaths.
As the case wound through the courts, the two defendants’ paths split. Mann pleaded guilty in April 2019 to four counts of second-degree murder, in a deal connected to his cooperation against White. In January 2022, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for his role in the killings.
White went to trial and was convicted by a jury in December 2021 of murder and other charges, including robbery, stemming from the same attack. In January 2022, a judge sentenced him to life in prison without parole, closing the courtroom chapter of a case that began with a family’s worry and ended with the discovery of four lives stolen in one locked apartment.
