In the biting cold of a late January night in Richmond, Virginia, 19-year-old Kadijah Nashae Stewart was found shot to death inside a car. On January 31, 2014, at approximately 1:50 a.m., Richmond Police responded to a call about a disturbance on Mandalay Road. There, they discovered the young Black woman in a vehicle, having sustained multiple gunshot wounds.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The investigation quickly revealed that this was not a random act of violence; Kadijah was the intended target. Detectives soon focused on a person of interest, 23-year-old Lionel Carter III, with whom Kadijah was intimately involved. The relationship was described as violent, and family members had previously warned her to stay away from him. Investigators learned that Carter and Stewart were together in his mother's car just moments before she was killed.
Following the murder, Lionel Carter III fled to Georgia. He was apprehended in DeKalb County and extradited back to Richmond to face charges. During the investigation, it was suggested that the motive for the killing was jealousy. A witness testified to overhearing a phone call earlier on the night of the murder in which Carter threatened to kill Stewart. Despite the circumstantial nature of the case, a jury took less than an hour to convict Carter of second-degree murder and the use of a firearm in the commission of a murder. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison for the death of Kadijah Stewart.
Years later, while still incarcerated for Kadijah's murder, Lionel Carter III orchestrated another heinous crime. In what authorities described as a murder-for-hire plot, he arranged the killing of his wife, Egypt Carter, in February 2024 because she was planning to leave him. This led to further charges against him, including aggravated murder.
