The family of a 17-year old girl who was stabbed to death last month during a fight over a stolen cellphone stormed out of a courtroom Friday after prosecutors allowed the teen’s 18-year-old attacker to plead to a lesser charge.

Prosecutors initially charged Kyla Jones with second-degree murder in the Oct. 17 stabbing death of Kaelia Minor. The teens got into an argument on a Metro bus, and authorities said Minor grabbed Jones’s phone and ran off the bus. Jones chased after her, they said, and stabbed Minor, who was unarmed.

In D.C. Superior Court, prosecutors agreed to reduce the charges to voluntary manslaughter and carrying a dangerous weapon. Prosecutors also agreed to ask a judge to sentence Jones to a term of between four and eight years when she is sentenced on March 17.

“She’s getting away with murder,” Minor’s mother, Docia Proctor, said outside the courtroom. “Drug dealers get more time than that.”

The slaying shocked many in the city as news spread about a teenage girl, a college-bound senior from Coolidge Senior High School, who was killed over a stolen cellphone.

“I don’t know anything about my daughter taking a cellphone,” Proctor said. “But even so, she killed my daughter over a phone. And now she’s getting a slap on the wrist.”

The teens had been involved in altercations since the summer, when they got into a fistfight as they waited for the No. 62 Metrobus on Gallatin Street in Northwest Washington. They vowed to fight again and, according to court documents, that is when Jones began carrying a steak knife for protection.

On the evening of Oct. 17, at the intersection of Kansas Avenue and Emerson Street NW, Jones boarded that same Metrobus, carrying that same knife, prosecutors said. Jones sat in the front of the bus and placed the knife on her lap. Minor sat in the back of the bus.

At some point, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jin Park said at the hearing Friday, Minor walked past the back exit of the bus to the front of the bus and began arguing with Jones. The two got into a scuffle and a witness tried to break it up.

During the fight, Minor grabbed Jones’s cellphone and ran off the bus. Jones, still armed with the knife, ran after her.

Outside the bus, the teens continued fighting. At one point, Jones plunged the knife into Minor’s chest.

According to prosecutors, witnesses said Jones showed little remorse and began rolling Minor’s body back and forth looking for her phone. “Where is my phone?” the prosecutor said witnesses recalled Jones screaming. “I don’t care what happened to her. Where is my f---ing phone?”

Jones then ran off and had a friend get an Uber ride for her. She threw the knife into a sewer, authorities said.

Hours later, Jones told her family about the incident and, accompanied by family members, she surrendered at police headquarters. Jones also directed police to where she threw the knife, and officers were able to recover it.

Jones, barely 5 feet tall and wearing a blue jail jumpsuit, stood next to public defender Dana Page in court Friday as details of the attack were described for the judge.

Park, the prosecutor, told Judge José Lopez that Jones was “not in any immediate danger of death at the time of the incident.”

Those comments seemed to enrage Minor’s family. “She was never in danger of losing her life,” Proctor said. “But my daughter lost hers. And now this is supposed to be justice?”

Source: washingtonpost.com

Date Posted: Monday, November 21st, 2016 , Total Page Views: 1921