Jury reaches verdict in shooting that crippled Columbus man, 21
After Courvoisia Brenica Wilson crippled a 21-year-old Columbus man she shot in the head while aiming for someone else, she sent the woman targeted a mocking text message.
It read in part: “now you gone feel how I feel to have somebody you luv took from you.” Added at the end were three laughing emojis.
A judge cited that email Friday as she sentenced Wilson to serve 40 years in prison plus 10 years on probation, just minutes after a jury convicted the 25-year-old on two counts of aggravated assault and two of using a gun to commit a crime.
Noting Wilson’s derisive tone in the text and her apparent lack of remorse, since the 2019 shooting near Columbus’ Lakebottom Park, visiting Judge Mary Staley said Wilson essentially had given the victim and his family a “life sentence,” because relatives will have to give him constant care for the rest of his life: He cannot walk, cannot use the bathroom, and cannot feed or bathe himself.
Attorneys said jurors deliberated about five hours before delivering the verdict around noon Friday. They found Wilson guilty of shooting at the woman and of shooting the man wounded, but not guilty of shooting at two other people who were present.
Wilson, who had been free on bond awaiting trial, was handcuffed and escorted from the courtroom. The victim’s family smiled and hugged each other, and his mother kissed him on the forehead as he sat in a wheelchair in the courtroom.
The backstory
Initial police testimony in the shooting portrayed it as a jealous assailant targeting her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Prosecutors this week said it in fact was Wilson’s attempt to intimidate or eliminate a witness against Malik Lamar Hightower, who at the time was jailed on multiple felony charges.
The woman Wilson was aiming for had dated Hightower, before his relationship with Wilson. Hightower had used the woman’s cell phone to set a man up for an armed robbery on March 31, 2019, when Hightower and another suspect showed up with guns and took the man’s 2006 Ford F-150 pickup truck.
They kidnapped the man at gunpoint, and shot him in the leg when he ran away, authorities said. Then they robbed a Circle K store and a barber shop, where Hightower was wounded when a victim shot him, prosecutors said.
Police caught Hightower at the hospital when he went in for treatment.
The cell phone he had used to set up the truck hijacking was tracked to his then-girlfriend, who gave investigators a statement incriminating Hightower, prosecutors said. So when Wilson started a relationship with Hightower, she blamed the woman for his incarceration, prosecutors said.
The shooting
On the morning of June 11, 2019, Wilson started calling the woman, challenging her to a fight and asking where she was, according to testimony this week in Wilson’s trial.
Wilson was in a red Kia Forte with two others when she tracked the woman down about 5:30 p.m. that day outside an apartment at 1246 18th Ave., about a block south of Lakebottom Park.
Wilson shouted at the woman when first the car passed by, and then the driver circled back, with Wilson hanging out a passenger window and firing a pistol, witnesses said. She missed the woman, but hit the 21-year-old standing nearby, the bullet piercing his forehead.
The victim’s mother saw him fall, blood pouring from his head. “I kind of blacked out,” she testified at Wilson’s trial, saying she didn’t remember the 911 call she made. “I know I started screaming,” she said.
She broke down on the witness stand Tuesday, crying as she described her son’s condition. Once healthy and active, “he started over from the baby stage,” she testified. “He had to learn to sit up.”
Two men police said were in the Kia with Wilson also were charged in the shooting. Prosecutors dismissed charges against one of them. The other, Kayne Dequandre Wiggins, 24, who detectives said was driving the car, pleaded guilty Tuesday after prosecutors alleged he tried to influence one of the jurors.
After Wiggins pleaded to four counts of aggravated assault, Staley sentenced him to 20 years in prison, with 15 years to serve and the rest on probation.
