Powhatan residents react to Taliaferro verdict

Justin Jones said his view of Powhatan County changed forever when a jury decided that last summer's shooting death of his friend Tahliek Taliaferro was an act of involuntary manslaughter, not first-degree murder.

"Justice has not been served the way it should have," Jones, a senior at Powhatan High School who played football with Taliaferro, said yesterday.

Jones, who is white, said he has to wonder whether it was racism or facts of the case that swayed the nearly all-white jury to the lesser charge. The two defendants, cousins Ethan and Joseph "Joey" Parrish, are white; Taliaferro was black.

"How are you going to shoot somebody in the back for self-defense?" he asked.

Ethan Parrish, 25, testified that he opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle out of fear after a confrontation between the Parrishes and Taliaferro.

A woman who answered the phone yesterday at the home of Linwood Parrish, Ethan Parrish's father, said the family did not want to talk about the case.

"We're trying just to live one moment at a time," she said. "We're trying to heal, too. This wasn't an easy thing for us."

Cody Eyles, another senior at Powhatan High, called the involuntary-manslaughter conviction shocking but said the injustice didn't sink in until he saw Taliaferro's family distraught outside the Powhatan County Courthouse on Monday.

"It gave everybody a sense you could get away with a lot more than you should," he said.

That sentiment was echoed by others yesterday.

Tiffany Smallwood, a student at Powhatan High, was dressed in black at the courthouse yesterday to show solidarity with the Taliaferro family and the others who were in the car when the popular high school student was slain and his friend Courtney Jones was seriously injured.

"He murdered our friend," she said of Ethan Parrish. "Tahliek is not coming back."

Smallwood, who is white, said she was disappointed in the verdict and fretted that only one black person was on the jury. But maybe, she added, the problem was not racial but age.

"They don't know how much it's hurting everybody," she said. "How much we miss Tahliek."

Others were more adamant that race was a factor in the verdict.

Said Cristina Taliaferro, who has a tattoo on her right arm honoring her cousin Tahliek, "I knew it wasn't going to be exactly fair, but it shouldn't have gone this downhill."

After Monday's verdict, Carl Jones, Courtney Jones' father, said he doesn't think race was a factor in the shooting, but may have been in the verdict.

"The evidence speaks for itself," he said.

Yesterday, the afternoon sun shone on sprigs of new grass that peeked from the reddish dirt covering Taliaferro's grave behind Little Zion Baptist Church on Cartersville Road.

Chris Langhorn, who said he dug Taliaferro's grave, said he thought the trial should have been held outside Powhatan.

"They took somebody's life. They'll be back on the street in five, six years," Langhorn predicted. "The kid is in the cemetery. It's a hard pill to swallow."

Margaret Harris-Manning, who served on the Powhatan Board of Supervisors from 1993 to 2004 and was the board's first and only black supervisor, was headed last night to a regular meeting of the county NAACP.

The retired Richmond teacher described race relations in Powhatan as "very strained. It has never been that good, I don't think, but now . . . there's animosity in the air. I don't know how the kids are going back to school. I really don't."

King Salim Khalfani, executive director of the Virginia State Conference NAACP, yesterday called the outcome of the case "jury nullification."

"This reaffirms the fact that many African-Americans feel they can't get justice," he said.

Contact Will Jones at (804) 649-6911 or .

Contact Jamie C. Ruff at (434) 223-3678 or .

Staff writer Michael Paul Williams contributed to this report.