David Jones was a 4-year-old Black boy who died on October 14, 1994, in Richmond, Virginia, in a burst of gunfire that turned an ordinary morning in Gilpin Court into a scene of sudden, irreversible loss. Inside the apartment on St. James Street, the day began with familiar faces and casual talk, but tension simmered beneath it: Tamika Jones, fourteen and heavily pregnant, was tied by circumstance and emotion to Christopher “Pops” Goins, and when an ultrasound photo of her unborn baby was
brought out, it sparked a flash of anger that witnesses later described as immediate and unsettling. Not long afterward, the conversation was shattered by rapid shots, then screams, then the heavy rhythm of a single person moving through the hallway.
When Richmond police arrived, they found that nearly everyone in the home had been hit. In the kitchen lay David’s body alongside those of his mother, Daphne Jones, and James Nathaniel Randolph Jr.; in a bedroom were the bodies of his older sister Nicole and his little brother Robert. The medical findings described the cruelty in clinical detail: David died from a gunshot wound to the head fired from close range, with stippling that indicated the muzzle was only a few feet away. Tamika and her youngest sister, Kenya, were the only survivors—Tamika after being shot repeatedly when the gunman entered her bedroom, and Kenya after being struck while Tamika tried to shield her. Believing the shooter had left, Tamika forced herself to call 911 and identified Goins by name, telling the operator that he had shot the others, too.
Investigators gathered a trail of physical evidence through the apartment:. 45-caliber cartridge casings scattered across rooms, bullets and fragments consistent with hollow-point ammunition, and forensic conclusions that the shots were fired from the same. 45-caliber Glock pistol. The gun itself was never recovered from the scene, but the case against Goins tightened through the weeks that followed. Firearms examiners later linked an unfired. 45-caliber cartridge found at the home of Goins’ girlfriend, Monique Littlejohn, to the same magazine associated with the murder weapon, and police also found materials connected to Glock firearms during searches tied to her. The story hardened into a portrait of flight and concealment—aliases on identification cards, a changed appearance, and a man trying to slip away from what he’d done.
The manhunt ended a month later, far from Richmond. On November 17, 1994, authorities captured Goins in Brooklyn during a predawn raid, taking Littlejohn into custody as well. In the wake of the arrests, attention also turned to others who had been near the apartment that morning. Barry Scott, who had arrived with Goins earlier that day and had been inside the apartment shortly before the shooting, later surrendered and was charged in Richmond as an accessory before the fact, even as Goins’ defense would argue in later proceedings that someone else—pointing toward Scott—was responsible for the killings.
Goins was ultimately convicted in Richmond of capital murder and multiple related felonies, including first-degree murder for David’s death, along with charges tied to the other killings and the wounding of Tamika and Kenya. A jury fixed his punishment at death for the capital murder count and additional life terms and years for the remaining convictions, and Virginia’s appellate courts upheld the verdicts and sentence as the case moved through years of review. Meanwhile, prosecutors pursued Littlejohn as well, arguing she helped set the tragedy in motion; a jury convicted her as an accessory before the fact, but the Virginia Court of Appeals later reversed those convictions, concluding the evidence did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she shared Goins’ criminal intent and noting that other plausible explanations—drug-related tensions and spontaneous violence—had not been excluded.
In December 2000, after final appeals failed and clemency was denied, the case reached its grim endpoint. Goins was executed by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, and officials pronounced him dead at 9:04 p.m. The legal record closed, but the story left behind in Richmond did not: a child’s life cut off in a kitchen, a family nearly erased, and a surviving sister whose 911 call carried the names of the dead into the world even as the last echoes of gunfire still hung in the apartment air.
