KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A jury found two teens guilty of stalking and killing a 16-year-old Austin-East High School student as he left school in February 2021 intent on going to his part-time job.
After a week-long trial, the jury entered deliberations Friday afternoon and returned a unanimous verdict roughly three and a half hours later at 8 p.m.
Deondre Davis, 18, and Rashan Jordan, 16, were found guilty of first-degree murder, felony murder and aggravated child abuse. The two received automatic life sentences for the first-degree murder convictions. Because the two were juveniles at the time of the crime, that life sentence will be between 25 to 36 years in prison, which is shorter than a life sentence handed to an adult.
The two are scheduled to be sentenced on May 18.
Stanley Freeman Jr. was among a handful of Austin-East students who died in 2021 because of gun violence, an outbreak for which the community grieves to this day.
Davis, then 16, and Jordan, then 14, were charged with his murder. They also face separate trials in several other armed attacks in a spree that broke out in early January 2021 and continued until just a couple days after Freeman was shot and killed.
Davis is now 18 and Jordan is 16. They've been in custody since Feb. 16, 2021, and were transferred from juvenile custody to face trial as adults.
While police quickly identified Davis and Jordan as the perpetrators in Freeman's death, no one has been charged in the deaths of several other teens in 2021 with ties to Austin-East.