Jacoya Mangrum was a 20-year-old Black woman and young mother from Louisville, Kentucky, whose life was cut short in the early morning hours of June 11, 2016. She spent much of the previous day riding around the city with friends, including Sequoia Camp and Troy Cheatham, with her one-year-old son along for the ride. Antwoin Williams, a man she knew, joined them as they drove from place to place, stopping at a friend’s home and later visiting a man’s house where Jacoya hoped to collect
money she was owed. When the man was not home, they went on to a nearby gas station, only to return later once the man had come back and finally given her the money she had been seeking.
By the time the group gathered again at the gas station around 3:44 a.m., the night had stretched long and tempers were fraying. Williams slid into the back passenger-side seat of Camp’s car, while Jacoya sat in the front passenger seat; her little boy was buckled in the back with Williams. They pulled away from the station with Cheatham following behind in his own car. Somewhere between the bright lights of the gas station and the dark residential streets near Louisville’s Parkway Place housing complex, an argument broke out between Jacoya and Williams over gas money. Voices rose, the disagreement turned physical, and as Camp drove through the Algonquin neighborhood, she struggled to keep control of the car while the two adults fought inside it.
Camp eventually pulled the car over near South 13th Street and Patton Court, outside the Parkway Place housing complex, where the quiet of the early morning was broken by the continuing confrontation. Cheatham stopped and got out of his vehicle, and together he and Camp tried to pull the two apart. For a moment it seemed the fight might end there, but the anger between them did not cool. Jacoya and Williams clashed again outside the car, exchanging blows and harsh words until Camp and Cheatham separated them a second time. Camp, trying to get everyone home safely, told Jacoya to get back into the car so she could drive her away from the chaos. Jacoya sat down in the front passenger seat with the door still open, her child in the back, and in a final flash of frustration she picked up Williams’s cell phone and threw it to the ground.
That gesture became the tragic turning point. According to court records, Williams came around the vehicle toward the open passenger-side door, drew a handgun, and shot Jacoya in the head before fleeing into the night. Camp rushed to pull the one-year-old boy from the back seat and called 911, but there was nothing that could be done; Jacoya died at the scene, in the very car where she had spent the day with her friends and her child. Police and neighbors converged on the car parked outside the housing complex, and news reports would later describe how the young mother was killed in front of her toddler, who miraculously was not physically harmed but was left without his mother.
Detectives quickly focused on Williams as the suspect. The day after the shooting, he was stopped during what began as a routine traffic stop, and officers took him into custody. Investigators tied him to the killing on South 13th Street and Patton Court, and he was charged with murder for shooting Jacoya, as well as first-degree wanton endangerment for creating a grave risk of death or serious physical injury to her young son in the back seat. Because Williams was already a convicted felon, prosecutors also charged him with possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, along with tampering with physical evidence and related offenses. His bond was set at $500,000 while he awaited trial, and local news stories described the anger and grief of community members who gathered for vigils near the scene to honor Jacoya’s memory and to demand justice for the young mother and her child.
Nearly three years later, in February 2019, the case went before a Jefferson County jury. Over four days of testimony, jurors heard how the long day of driving, the dispute over gas money, and the struggle in and around the car culminated in a single, fatal gunshot. Williams’s defense argued for a lesser charge, claiming he had acted in the heat of an emotional disturbance, but the jury rejected that view. They found him guilty of murder, first-degree wanton endangerment, possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, and of being a second-degree persistent felony offender. Additional charges from the traffic stop led to convictions for attempted criminal possession of a forged instrument and tampering with physical evidence. The court imposed a total sentence of 30 years in prison, with the various sentences running concurrently. In 2020, the Kentucky Supreme Court reviewed his appeal and upheld the convictions and sentence, leaving in place the judgment that the man who shot Jacoya Mangrum would spend decades behind bars for taking her life in front of her child.
