A Waggaman man was convicted Thursday night (Dec. 15) for his involvement in a retaliatory ambush-style shooting of a Marrero woman and her 2-year-old son, who was struck in his chest by a bullet as he walked with his mother to their apartment.

Kedrick “KK” Anderson, 24, faces up to 50 years in prison for each of the two counts of attempted second-degree murder. A Jefferson Parish jury returned with its guilty-as-charged verdicts at 10:30 p.m., Thursday.

The 25-year-old woman and her toddler were walking between buildings at an apartment complex in the 2800 block of Mount Kennedy Drive, about 11 p.m. on July 13, 2013, when three gunmen opened fire in an ambush. Bullets struck buildings and a shed, as the woman dropped to the ground.

One bullet struck the child in the chest and exited his back, as his mother crawled through the grass to the toddler. She picked up her son and ran around a building to escape to her nearby apartment, according to testimony.

As the woman ran away from the gunfire, she heard more gunshots. She emerged from between two buildings and noticed Anderson, holding a rifle and standing near large garbage bins behind the apartment complex. Anderson fired the rifle but not the bullet that injured the child.

The woman escaped to her apartment, where 911 was called. EMS was dispatched. Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Deputy Chris Lewis arrived at the apartment, picked up the wounded child and rushed him to paramedics outside, likely saving his life, according to testimony.

The shooting was one in a chain of violent crimes in 2013 involving a dispute between two groups of people who targeted one-another in seeking street justice. The woman and her child were fired upon because of their connection to the child’s father, Antoine Payne, whom his rivals suspected cooperated with police in a 2010 armed robbery case.

Based upon the spent bullet casings recovered at the scene, investigators determined that four firearms were used in the shooting. Two were 9mm pistols, one was a .45-caliber pistol and the fourth was an AK-47 assault rifle, based on the 7.62 by 39mm caliber casings. Those casings were the only ones that could be fired from a rifle, Sheriff’s Office firearms examiner Jené Rauch testified.

The AK-47 casings were recovered from near the garbage bins, where Anderson stood with a rifle during the shooting.

One of the 9mm pistols also was used in two homicides, in Marrero and Metairie, and a shoot-out that continued across the Crescent City Connection to the elevated Westbank Expressway in Gretna on July 16, 2013, detective Sgt. Gary Barteet testified.

The investigation of the shooting of the mother and son continued without results for three months, until Deputy Joseph Ragas spoke with the victim’s family. Ragas knew the victim’s family, an association that provided him with the opportunity to meet with the woman in October 2013. The woman eventually identified the men who shot at her and her son.

“She was afraid,” Ragas testified. “She was afraid to come forward.”

The dispute which led to her son getting shot stemmed from a 2010 armed robbery case, in which Payne pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and received a three-year prison sentence. His co-defendant pleaded guilty to armed robbery and received a 20-year prison sentence. Payne’s plea to a lesser charge led acquaintances to suspect that he cooperated with law enforcement in order to get less prison time.

As such, Payne became a target for violent acts. The victim of the Mount Kennedy shooting testified she was unaware of the ongoing problems her children’s father was having with his rivals. In testimony on Wednesday, she blamed Payne for her son getting shot.

A month after the Mount Kennedy shooting, on Aug. 12, 2013, Payne fired three gunshots from a distance at a car driven by the 22-year-old mother of Anderson’s children as she drove in the 900 block of Beechgrove Boulevard in Bridge City. The woman’s 1-year-old son was in the car with her.

No one was injured, but the woman identified Payne as the gunman. She also said she believed she was targeted in retaliation for the Mount Kennedy shooting, in which Payne’s son was wounded.

For that crime, Payne pleaded guilty last year to aggravated assault and received a 2-year prison sentence followed by three years of probation, the first year of which is to be spent in home incarceration.

Anderson, in testifying on Thursday, denied involvement in the shooting and testified that the woman wrongly identified him. Judge Stephen Enright of the 24^th Judicial District Court is scheduled to sentence Anderson on Jan. 17.

Assistant District Attorneys Angad Ghai and Douglas Rushton prosecuted the case.

A Marrero man who was convicted last month of robbing the same West Jefferson bank branch twice, about one year apart, has been sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Brandon Gray, 40, was convicted as charged by a Jefferson Parish jury on Sept. 22 of five counts of armed robbery, aggravated flight and two counts of aggravated assault. The five armed robbery counts represent the five bank employees he victimized during the two bank robberies.

With three of the victims sitting and the case detective Marc Macaluso seated in the front row of her courtroom, Judge Danyelle Taylor of the 24^th Judicial District Court sentenced Gray on Wednesday (Oct. 19) to 50 years for each of the robbery victims, five years for the aggravated assault and six months for each of the aggravated flight charges.

The 50-year sentences are to be served without benefit of probation, parole or suspended sentence. Judge Taylor ran the sentences concurrently and told Gray that his “actions were malevolent in nature.”

One of the victims wrote a letter to the court as impact testimony, urging the judge to sentence Gray to the maximum punishment allowable. She noted “the tremendous impact” Gray’s crimes had on her and her coworkers, and that he had not been rehabilitated after serving prison time for a 1997 armed robbery, involving the carjacking of a 64-year-old Westwego man in front of his home.

The victim said she and coworkers twice had to endure Gray entering their workplace, leaving in his wake anxiety that employees continue to suffer despite knowing that he has been incarcerated. One employee no longer works in banks because of the robbery experience.

“Mr. Gray held a gun to my ribs and threatened to kill me,” the victim wrote.

Gray robbed the Iberia Bank branch on Barataria Boulevard in Marrero on Sept. 30, 2013 and got away with it until he returned to the bank a second time on Oct. 9, 2014, to rob it again, according to trial testimony.

As Gray entered the bank, using vulgar and threatening language and pointing a pistol at employees, a banker happened to be speaking on the phone with her husband, a Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office lieutenant. He immediately began broadcasting the robbery in progress over the police radio system, relaying to his fellow deputies details about the robber as soon as his wife relayed the details to him, according to testimony.

With that information, a deputy spotted Gray in his sports-utility vehicle stopped at a red light at a Marrero intersection. Noticing the deputy behind him, Gray became nervous and accelerated through the red light, leading deputies on a pursuit through Marrero, according to testimony.

Gray drove into the Lincolnshire subdivision, where he wrecked his SUV into a house on Constantine Street. He jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran around the rear of his SUV. The plastic grocery bag in which he carried the stolen cash snagged the rear bumper, ripping it open and spilling the bills on the lawn.

He then climbed over a side fence into the house’s back yard, where he turned and faced two deputies. He pointed a pistol at the deputies, one of whom opened fire, striking Gray once in his right leg, according to trial testimony.

Gray fled but was caught nearby. The two deputies are the victims in the aggravated flight and aggravated assault charges.

The weapon Gray used during the 2014 robbery was an air gun pellet pistol, leading his attorney to argue at trial that, among other things, he could not be convicted of armed robbery.

Judge Taylor noted Gray’s use of the pellet pistol. “No one should have to experience that,” Judge Taylor said, noting the victims’ testimony.

Gray, seated in a wheel chair because of the gunshot wound, said nothing during the sentencing hearing. His attorney’s requests for a new trial and post-verdict judgment of acquittal were denied.

Assistant District Attorneys Blair Constant and Thomas Sanderson prosecuted the case.

A Marrero teenager whose DNA connected him to a carjacking outside a busy West Bank business abruptly ended his trial Thursday morning and pleaded guilty as charged.

After hearing his victim and deputies testify against him, Rockeen Jacks, 19, admitted on the second day of his trial his guilt of armed robbery using a firearm. He admitted he committed the Dec. 22, 2015 crime outside a convenience store in the 6200 block of the Westbank Expressway, at Ames Boulevard in Marrero.

In accepting the plea, Judge Stephen Grefer of the 24^th Judicial District Court sentenced Jacks to 16 years in prison: 10 years for the robbery, five years as a sentence enhancement because a gun was used in the crime and one year for an unrelated battery on a corrections officer for an incident in the parish jail in June.

The 64-year-old victim testified he purchased a plate of food in the store and was returning to his 2002 Nissan Altima in the parking lot about 4 p.m. That’s when Jacks, his head covered by the hoodie he wore as he lurked in the parking lot, approached the victim with a black semiautomatic pistol beside his leg.

Jacks repeatedly demanded the keys. The victim initially resisted, even as they stood “eye to eye, face to face,” the victim testified Wednesday.

An “old man” who witnessed the altercation told the victim to give the robber the keys, the victim testified. “Man, don’t let him shoot you out here for nothing,” the man told him before driving away, never to be identified. The victim surrendered the keys.

During his testimony, the victim was asked to describe the robber. “What did he look like? He’s sitting right there,” the victim replied, pointing to Jacks sitting nearby at the defense table.

Jacks drove away east on the Westbank Expressway. The victim called 911, initiating an investigation by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Two days later, on Christmas Eve 2015, the victim and his brother separately spotted the stolen car with two men inside, being driven north on Silver Lilly Lane in Marrero. The victim called 911 and followed the car, relating his whereabouts to the dispatcher until he lost it. He spotted it parked in the 900 block of DiMarco Drive – the same block where Jacks lived. Its occupants were gone. He called 911 again, reporting he found the car.

The Sheriff’s Office Regional DNA Laboratory later found Jacks’ DNA on a plastic water bottle in the car. His DNA profile was in a federal law enforcement database because of a previous conviction of battery on a welfare worker. When shown a photographic line-up that included Jacks’ photo, the victim positively identified him as the person who carjacked him.

Assistant District Attorneys Thomas Sanderson and Blair Constant prosecuted the case.