In the early morning hours of June 23, 2018, the body of 37-year-old Eric Phillips, a male from Benton Harbor, was discovered by an off-duty police officer in the parking lot of the McConnell Family Boathouse near the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Phillips had been shot multiple times between 3:30 and 3:45 a.m., though his body was not found for another three hours.
Investigators utilized video surveillance from the boathouse to piece together the events of that
morning. The footage showed Phillips arriving in a red Mustang with a woman, later identified as Tastacia Parker. They exited the vehicle and were approached by two other individuals. A brief exchange occurred before one of the individuals, a man in a long-sleeved white t-shirt and blue jeans, fired at least one shot at Phillips. Phillips attempted to flee but collapsed in the parking lot. The woman he was with and the other two individuals fled the scene.
A key breakthrough in the case came from an examination of Phillips's Facebook account, which revealed conversations he had with Tastacia Parker about meeting at the East Race. When questioned by police, Parker admitted to being with Phillips at the boathouse when he was shot. Further investigation of Parker's own Facebook account uncovered a picture of a man dressed similarly to the shooter in the surveillance video. This man was identified as 24-year-old Elbert Briggs. A photo of Briggs with a Sccy 9mm handgun was also found on his Facebook page. Ballistics analysis later confirmed that the projectile recovered from Phillips's body and the casings found at the scene were fired from a Sccy 9mm.
Phone records for both Briggs and Parker placed them in the immediate vicinity of the boathouse at the time of the murder. The records also showed that they traveled together from South Bend to Fort Wayne, and then to West Palm Beach, Florida, following the shooting. In November 2018, Elbert Briggs was charged with one count of murder. The following January, Tastacia Parker was also charged with murder and was arrested in Fort Wayne by the U.S. Marshals Service.
In June 2019, Elbert Briggs was convicted of the murder of Eric Phillips and was subsequently sentenced to 65 years in prison in July 2019. In a plea agreement, the murder charges against Tastacia Parker were dismissed. She pleaded guilty to assisting a criminal and perjury. In March 2020, Parker was sentenced to four years in prison for assisting a criminal, with an additional two years of community corrections or home detention for the perjury charge, to be served consecutively.
