Updated Thursday 5 p.m. with information from a juror.
The jury in the Rafael Aikens double murder trial reached a verdict Thursday morning after deliberating for an hour on Wednesday and 15 minutes Thursday morning. Managing editor Tami Roleff was in the courtroom when the verdicts were read…
An all-white jury of eight women and four men found Rafael Aikens, 24, guilty of murdering Renee Metcalf, 62, and Christy McKissic, 32, in March 2017. They also found that Aikens used a firearm in the murders and a special enhancement. The jurors agreed that Aikens shot McKissic in her cheek while they were in bed in her bedroom, then shot her mother, Metcalf, in the leg and back when she got up to see what happened. Sometime in the shooting spree, Aikens also shot 2 bullets into the bedroom wall. Aikens then shot another bullet into McKissic’s head, then shot his seventh and final bullet into Metcalf’s head. Before leaving their home, he confronted McKissic’s then 10-year old daughter, pointed the gun at her, realized he was out of bullets, then told her to shut up and go to sleep. He then grabbed four bullet casings, a condom wrapper and condom, and McKissic’s phone before he left. Aikens faces mandatory life sentences for each murder. He will be sentenced October 18.
Following the verdict announcement, family members and friends of McKissic, Metcalf, and Aikens could be seen hugging and consoling each other in the hallway outside the courtroom.
A juror, who identified himself only as Juror #10, told Z107.7 News in an email that eight of the 12 jurors caught something they felt the prosecutor missed. In the video that shows Mihlbachler’s Toyota 4Runner pulling up to the Combat Center’s main gate at 12:20 a.m., the jurors could clearly see that the driver’s arm, appearing in the vehicle’s window as it retrieving its identification card, was dark skinned. He said the four other jurors who missed that in court were “iffy” on convicting Aikens of first-degree murder. But the juror said when he pulled that particular frame up on the laptop during deliberations, and they examined it, they all immediately went with the verdict of guilty to make it unanimous as it tied Aikens to the Toyota and the timeline. A straw vote Wednesday was unanimous. The jurors slept on their decision overnight and voted the same way Thursday morning.
