A Jefferson Parish judge sentenced Armande Tart to life in prison after he abruptly ended his trial Tuesday morning (Aug. 18) by pleading guilty as charged to murdering four people and attempting to kill a fifth person in a Metairie apartment complex.
Prosecutors were preparing to present testimony from their fourth witness in the trial that began on Monday when Tart’s attorneys announced that their client would plead guilty. Tart did so knowing that the mandatory punishment is life in prison without benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence.
Tarte, 30, of New Orleans, received four life sentences in prison for brutally stabbing and strangling a man to death in his apartment in the 2500 block of Pasadena Avenue in the early morning hours of March 15, 2017. He then shot four people in another apartment in the small complex, killing three of them and leaving a surviving woman with permanent scars from a gunshot wound to her head.
This week marked the second time Tart was tried for the murders. He was convicted of the crimes in December 2020 and sentenced to life in prison a month later. But he received a new trial after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an unrelated case, Ramos v. Louisiana, that non-unanimous verdicts are unconstitutional. All 12 jurors in his first trial did not agree on the verdicts.
In court on Tuesday, Tart apologized for taking their lives and blamed his actions on the illegal narcotics he was abusing at the time. The lone survivor said in victim-impact testimony that she did not know Tart, and he didn’t need to shoot her.
In dismissing the 12 jurors and two alternates who were selected on Monday morning, and after accepting Tart’s guilty plea and sentencing him, 24th Judicial District Judge Donald “Chick” Foret spoke of the victims’ families and “all the pain and suffering they had to go through.”
Tart’s first victim was Harold Frisard, 55, whom he stabbed 48 times in the neck and strangled to death, leaving his body in the bathtub before stealing many of his personal items.
A short while later, at about 3:30 a.m., Tart walked into a nearby apartment and asked the occupants to use the restroom. He then opened fire, killing Kyle Turner, 50, of Laplace; John Henry, 56, of Metairie; and Rose Mary Charles, 61, of Metairie. They all were shot in their heads, and all died at the scene.
He also shot the 33-year-old woman who accompanied Turner to the apartment complex for a narcotics transaction. Although shot twice, including once in the head, she survived and pretended to be dead. She listened motionless as Tart rifled through Turner’s pockets and fled after taking illegal drugs from the coffee table. Although she did not know Tart, she was able to identify him as the shooter.
“Everyone else was in the apartment dead. Executed. By one person,” Assistant District Attorney Jenny Voss told jurors in opening statements on Monday.
The surviving victim called 911 after Tart fled. The first Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office deputies arrived on the scene and entered the apartment. They found Charles slumped over on the sofa, still holding a lit cigarette. Turner lay on the floor in the entrance to the dining room, and Henry’s body was crumpled against a wall on the kitchen floor.
Investigating the shootings, detectives obtained the apartment complex’s security video footage. It showed that before he entered the apartment and departed four minutes later after shooting the victims, Tart had gone in and out of another apartment in the complex.
After obtaining a search warrant, detectives entered that second apartment hours after discovering the murder victims. “They walked in and did not expect to find what they found,” Assistant DA Voss told jurors. It was Frisard’s body.
In both apartments, detectives observed a shoe sole herringbone design tracked through blood, indicating that the same person was responsible for the crimes.
Three times during the crime spree, Tart tried to dislodge the lone video surveillance camera that looked over the apartment complex’s courtyard. Despite that, he was recorded walking to and from apartments.
At points, he concealed his identity by covering himself with what appeared to be a white bed sheet, “trying to disguise himself as a ghost in that apartment complex,” Assistant DA Voss told jurors.
After removing items from Frisard’s apartment, Tart left the scene with Turner’s cell phone and Turner’s black Acura. Tart ditched the cell phone in Algiers and the car in New Orleans’ Central City.
Detectives later used geolocation technology to track Tart’s whereabouts during and immediately following the murders. His cell phone was in the immediate vicinity of the murders when they occurred. Then, 20 minutes after the murders, Tart’s cell phone was in Algiers, near where Turner’s cell phone was later found. After that, his cell phone was in Central City, near where Turner’s car was found.
On the morning of the murders, Tart wore Adidas athletic paints with three stripes down the legs, and an L.B. Landry High School hoodie, according to video surveillance footage taken from the apartment complex. Detectives later found a video of Tart on his cell phone showing him wearing similar clothing. “He was wearing the same clothes as the perpetrator who committed these homicides,” Assistant DA Voss told jurors.
A separate video detectives found on Tart’s cell phone showed that nine days before the murders, he was in Frisard’s apartment. In the video, he brandishes a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol. The imagery was clear enough to show the pistol’s serial number, allowing ballistics experts to determine that it was the murder weapon.
Frisard’s DNA was found throughout Turner’s car, suggesting that Tart used an item that belonged to Frisard to clean Turner’s vehicle before he abandoned it in Central City.
In opening statements on Monday, Tart’s attorneys told jurors that the evidence was not strong enough to prove their client committed the crimes.
Jurors heard testimony from three witnesses on Monday: One of the first deputies to arrive at the murder scene, a homicide detective and a DNA analyst. As the second day of the trial was about to begin, prosecutors were preparing to present testimony from the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy.
The prosecutors entered the courtroom to learn that Tart was willing to plead guilty as charged to:
- Second-degree murder for killing Harold Frisard, for which Tart was sentenced to life in prison;
- First-degree murder for killing Kyle Turner, for which Tart was sentenced to life in prison;
- First-degree murder for killing Rosmary Charles, for which Tart was sentenced to life in prison;
- First-degree murder for killing John Henry, for which Tart was sentenced to life in prison;
- Attempted first-degree murder for shooting the surviving woman, for which Judge Foret sentenced Tart to 50 years in prison, the maximum;
- Obstruction of justice, for which the judge sentenced Tart to 20 years in prison.
Judge Foret ran the sentences concurrently.
Assistant District Attorneys Rachel Africk and Jenny Voss prosecuted the case.