Joshua Ellis “Josh” Tarver, a 23-year-old white man from Wesson, Mississippi, spent the first week of December 2014 moving between his everyday routines and a piece of rural land he rented in Copiah County, not far from Crystal Springs. On December 6, 2014, that quiet property turned into the center of a confrontation that left him dead from gunshot wounds and set in motion a homicide investigation and a years-long court case.
Tarver’s rented land lay in a wooded area off Gallatin Road near Crystal Springs. That weekend, deputies from the Copiah County Sheriff’s Office were called to the area and found him shot to death in the woods behind the 3000 block of Gallatin Road. The sheriff later explained that the ground there was muddy, and Tarver had been on land he rented from the property owner, William Ray “Bill” Parks of Crystal Springs. Authorities quickly treated the death as a homicide, and Parks, the landowner, was taken into custody in connection with the shooting after what was described as a dispute or argument between the two men.
The two were not strangers. Court filings later described Tarver as a former employee of Parks, and the events of that day were rooted in an ongoing dispute over missing property. According to an account laid out in appellate documents, Tarver arrived on Parks’s rural property accompanied by others, driving a truck and trailer loaded with tools that had been stolen from Parks and were being brought back without prior notice.
Inside his shop on the property, Parks heard the sound of a vehicle engine spinning as if stuck in the mud. The rural location meant law enforcement could take a long time to arrive, and, by his own later testimony, he took a. 45-caliber pistol from the shop, tucked it into the back of his jeans, and went outside to see what was happening. His mother, realizing Tarver was on the land, shouted a warning, and Parks told her to call 911 as he walked toward the noise. When he reached the area, he saw a truck and trailer bogged down in the mud and said he recognized his own tools stacked in the trailer. Believing someone was in the process of hauling them away, he started firing at the front wheel of the truck.
What happened in the next moments became the core of the trial. Parks later testified that Tarver appeared and called out, “Don’t shoot, it’s Josh,” and that he answered, “I know. Stop,” while firing what he described as a warning shot into the ground in front of Tarver before turning back to shoot at the truck’s tires again. According to this version of events, Tarver then ran at him, jumped on him, and tried to wrestle the gun away. As the two struggled, Parks said he was knocked to the ground and the pistol went off, striking Tarver, who then fell where a trailer tire ran over him as the truck and trailer pulled away from the scene. Parks ran back toward his house, leaving the gun on the hood of a truck as he passed, then returned to check on Tarver while his mother had already called for help.
Sheriff’s deputies and medical personnel arrived to find Tarver dead in the wooded area on the rented property, his death attributed to gunshot wounds. The case quickly shifted from a chaotic scene in the mud to a formal criminal investigation. Parks was arrested and initially charged with murder; a Copiah County grand jury later indicted him for deliberate-design murder, the most serious form of intentional killing under Mississippi law, reflecting the state’s view that the shooting had not been a mere accident.
When the case went to trial in Copiah County Circuit Court, prosecutors presented the shooting as an unjustified killing, while the defense maintained that Parks had armed himself because of the remote setting and the earlier theft, and that the fatal shot was either an accident during the struggle or an act taken in fear. The jury was instructed on several possible verdicts, including deliberate-design murder, second-degree murder, and heat-of-passion manslaughter. In the end, the jurors rejected both a full acquittal based on self-defense and the state’s theory of an intentional murder, convicting Parks of heat-of-passion manslaughter instead.
The trial judge sentenced Parks to twenty years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, with two of those years suspended and two years of post-release supervision, leaving a lengthy term of incarceration for the killing. Parks appealed, arguing among other things that the jury should not have been instructed on heat-of-passion manslaughter and challenging the medical testimony about Tarver’s cause of death, but in 2017 the Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed both his conviction and his sentence. A subsequent motion for rehearing, reiterating that the shooting was accidental during a struggle over the gun, did not succeed in changing the outcome, leaving the manslaughter conviction in place while Tarver’s family and community had already buried him and tried to rebuild their lives after the violent loss on that rented patch of Copiah County woods.
