On a sunny morning in May 2019, Brittany Hill held her toddler daughter on her hip as she spoke to family and friends on a residential North Austin street, at first barely noticing the car that pulled up.
Her daughter, though, smiled at two men in the car, and then 1-year-old Ja-Miley Jones waved at them.
Moments later, prosecutors said during a bench trial this week, the two men aimed their guns, then fired.
Hill, 24, ran away, using her 123-pound body to shield her infant child even as she fell to the ground. She was killed, but her baby was spared any injury — and all of it was captured by a police street camera.
Nearly six years later, Judge Thomas Byrne said he found the video so clear and compelling that on Wednesday he convicted Michael Washington and Eric Adams of first degree murder shortly after hearing closing arguments in the case. He added that other evidence presented by prosecutors during the proceedings this week supported what he viewed on the footage.
“The video clearly captured the crime and the perpetrators of the crime, as well as, sadly, the victim,” Byrne said, delivering his ruling at the Leighton Criminal Court Building. “I saw that young, 24-year-old mother die on the videotape.”
Family members in the courtroom wore shirts bearing Hill’s photograph, crying softly as Byrne read his decision.
“She was my heart,” her father, James Hill, said afterward, his eyes still holding tears.
Ja-Miley is now 7 years old. The young girl is thriving, Hill said. She’s smart and funny, and tells her grandparents that she believes her mother is still here with them. She is also aware, he said, of what happened to her as a baby.
“She knows everything,” he said.
But the family saw a measure of justice on Wednesday as prosecutors secured convictions against both defendants.
“They arrived together, they were armed together, they killed together and they fled together,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Christina Brewer during closing arguments. “They left their faces on that video.”
Prosecutors had alleged that Adams and Washington drove up in a Chevy Impala and fired upon the group with which Hill and her daughter had congregated. Witnesses identified the men, who were arrested hours later in the same clothes worn in the video, they said.
“He continues to shoot while Ja-Miley Jones is clinging to her mother,” Assistant State’s Attorney Erika Barnas said.
Defense attorneys for the two men argued that the state did not meet its burden of proof. An attorney for Washington told the judge that one of the eyewitnesses only came forward with a statement months later while in the Kane County Jail.
John Nocita, who represents Adams, argued that the state’s evidence didn’t show that his client actually fired a weapon.
“You don’t see shooting. You don’t see aiming. You don’t see recoil or smoke,” he said.
Byrne, though, was unpersuaded.
“That tape leaves no question as to what occurred,” he said. “The proof is overwhelming in this case.”