“I’m going to strip you naked and whip you like the slave you are,” that was the harrowing message Kevin Ashley Parnell left his daughter’s ex-boyfriend, Jordan Briggs, via Facebook.
It was just one of the many racially charged messages the police say Parnell sent. He would send one more “you were warned”, before finally taking to the road and showing up at Briggs’ Julie Avenue house.
Authorities say that Parnell was left incensed after his daughter was arrested on charges of prostitution. According to reports, Parnell blamed Briggs for the incident, a charge which Briggs wholeheartedly denied.
Briggs recounts the series of events that followed as Parnell showed up at his residence in a white pick –up. Describing how he heard Parnell banging on his door, calling for him to come out. At which point Briggs had frozen up and gone to the back of the house. His roommate, 28-year-old Sammie Jones, who is also black, had instead decided to go out and confront Parnell, in an attempt to calm the man down.
However, when Parnell attempted to apologize and ease the tension, Parnell pulled out a gun allegedly stating;
“You know what kind of gun this is boy? It is a Glock 40.”
Briggs describes what happened next.
“Sammie was being so calm. … He just shot my bro in the face and burned off,”
Upon arrival at the scene, the police immediately announced the young man’s death. In a statement released after the incident, Homicide detective, Sgt. Joe Loughman, backed up the story as described by Parnell saying,
“He was shot because he was trying to keep an irate man from his friend.”
The police issued an arrest warrant for Parnell the same night the murder took place, arresting the man the next morning as he showed up to work at his contract job at a General Motors factory. He is currently being held at Mansfield Jail in Texas, with bail set at $500,000.
In a strange irony, Parnell’s daughter is actually biracial, and the prostitution charges levied against her were recently dismissed after she was placed on deferred-adjudication probation for her role in an unrelated theft.
As far has her father goes, the likely charges he will face are still up in the air. The Texas law does allow for sentencing on crimes to be enhanced if Judges or Juries deem them to be hate crimes. Such an allowance is not made in the case of first-degree felonies such as murder, as these already carry a maximum sentence of 5-99 years.
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