ST. LOUIS — A
St. Louis jury on Saturday convicted Eric Lawson of the first-degree murder of
his own 10-month-old son as well as his ex-girlfriend and her mother in 2012.
Jurors took
less than three hours, and will return Monday for the penalty phase of the
trial, which will determine if Lawson will be sentenced to die for killing
Breiana Ray, 22, Gwendolyn Ray, 50, and Aiden Lawson. It is the first potential
death penalty case in St. Louis in a decade.
Several of the
Ray relatives, watching from a different courtroom due to coronavirus
precautions, pumped their fists when the verdicts were read. One man bent over
at the waist with his head down.
“Yessss!!!!!!”
wrote Revitra Greco, Breiana Ray’s aunt, when texted the news of the verdict.
“To God be the glory,” she said.
In closing
arguments Saturday afternoon, prosecutors painted Eric Lawson as a heartless
monster who was fed up with being a single parent. Lawson’s lawyers responded
with a dual argument: They said prosecutors hadn’t presented enough evidence to
prove Lawson killed the three; then said if jurors disagreed, Lawson wasn’t
guilty of the three first-degree murder charges but of lesser offenses.
The crime occurred in an apartment at
2145 South Jefferson Avenue on May 5, 2012.
Assistant
Attorney General Natalie Warner said Lawson was frustrated with the obligations
of being a single parent, and the resulting squabbles with Breiana Ray. He’d
texted friends saying he wished he was childless and that he hated his life,
she said.
When Breiana
Ray texted him telling him he needed to get baby formula, he took a Smith &
Wesson 9 mm handgun that he’d bought in January out of a case in his closet,
loaded it, and then put on jeans instead of his ubiquitous basketball shorts so
he could put it in his waistband, Warner said.
“He knowingly
and willingly made the decision to kill each and every one of them,” Warner
told jurors.
He stopped at
Schnucks for the formula, and arrived around 8:50 p.m. He then paced around the
apartment, acting strangely and walking in circles, until Breiana Ray’s back
was turned so she wouldn’t fight back. Lawson shot her in the head as she
washed baby bottles at the sink, Warner said.
Lawson shot
Gwendolyn Ray twice in the head after she came downstairs to check on her
daughter, and then set a fire in two places in the apartment and locked the
door behind him, so he wouldn’t have to see his son die.
“No one sets a
fire next to a 10-month-old baby without the intent of killing that baby,”
Warner said.
Aiden died
scared, she said.
Lawson went
home, unloaded and put away the gun, and then looked up on his phone how to
remove gunpowder residue, she said.
Defense lawyer
Julie Regenbogen-Clark said that based on a fire investigator’s testimony and
cellphone records, Lawson couldn’t have been in the apartment when the fire
started.
She asked:
“How could Eric Lawson be responsible for setting a fire at 10 p.m. when he was
home by 9:55?”
She suggested
that police may have fed details of the crime to Lawson in the two hours
between when he was questioned and arrested, and said a firearms examiner only
“eyeballed” a bullet recovered from the crime scene to determine that it
matched Lawson’s gun.
Pivoting to
her attempt to convince jurors that the crime was not first-degree murder,
Regenbogen-Clark said prosecutors made the “worst possible inferences about
details” to say that Lawson was guilty of premeditated murder, saying he
carried a gun for protection after almost being robbed. She also said
frustrated text messages between people in a strained relationship are not
unusual.
She said
Lawson’s statement to police that his “temper just took over” showed that any
crime was not pre-planned.
In her
response, Christine Krug, who is also with the attorney general’s office, said
Regenbogen-Clark was misinterpreting evidence to favor her client.
“This
defendant killed three people and every piece of evidence says it,” she told
the jury.
The Missouri
Attorney General’s Office is trying the case because a prosecutor with St. Louis
Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office previously
counseled Lawson when the prosecutor was a public defender.
Officials tried to hold a trial in 2019 but
couldn’t get enough jurors due to their scheduling conflicts and their opinions
on the death penalty.
The jurors
have been sequestered since the start of the trial.
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