Slashed tires, spray-painted car and parking lot fight: Newport News Post Office feud turned deadly

NEWPORT NEWS — A murder trial began Tuesday in a slaying that prosecutors say stemmed from a long-running feud between two female U.S. Postal Service mail carriers in Newport News.

A man who didn’t work at the Post Office — the husband of a mail carrier — ended up dead as a result of the dispute.

Now Jeremy Todd Pettway, 41, a mailman at a Newport News post office, faces first-degree murder and other charges in the April 7 slaying of 39-year-old Salahud-Din “Sal” Ibn Shabazz just inside the doorway of his Newport News home.

Though Shabazz didn’t work at the Post Office, prosecutors say the 2 a.m. killing arose from a running feud that his wife — mail carrier Jacqueline Nicole Shabazz — was having with a fellow mail carrier named Tashara Jackson.

“We didn’t like each other,” Jacqueline Shabazz testified this week.

In an incident in March, the women exchanged words outside a Newport News nail salon, and Jacqueline Shabazz testified at trial that she used a pocket knife to slash Jackson’s tires while Jackson was inside the salon.

In an apparent retribution a few days later, Jacqueline’s car was vandalized when her family was out of town over Easter weekend. The car’s tires were slashed, it was heavily spray painted in red and an object was stuffed into the gas tank.

Shortly after the Shabazzes returned to town and found the vandalized car in their driveway, Jacqueline and her husband learned that Jackson was to attend a party on April 6 at Harpoon Larry’s restaurant on J. Clyde Morris Boulevard.

They went to the restaurant that night to confront her, and found her outside.

Witnesses told police that Sal Shabazz pointed a Taser at others to keep them at bay while his wife and Jackson fought in the parking lot.

A couple hours later, Jacqueline Shabazz testified that she and her four children went to an Extended Stay motel in York County that night because she thought Jackson might try to retaliate.

But Shabazz’s husband didn’t join them there, she said, saying he decided to stay home instead.

Jacqueline testified that she was talking with her husband on the phone at about 2 a.m. when he heard a knock on the door. When he went to answer, she said, she heard a brief exchange of words over the phone, followed by two gunshots.

She called 911.

“We just had an altercation with a group of people, and they shot my husband,” she told a police dispatcher on the call. Medics and police soon found Sal Shabazz dead of four gunshot wounds.

Police investigators testified that the evidence soon led them to Jeremy Pettway and Jackson as conspirators to Sal Shabazz’s killing.

Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Andrea Booden and Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jacqueline Donner contended that Jackson enlisted Pettway to go with her to the Shabazzes’ home on Menchville Court to confront Sal and Jaqueline.

The prosecutors introduced evidence indicating that Jackson likely left her mother’s place south of Mercury Boulevard, picked up Pettway at his home, then drove toward the Shabazzes’ house.

Newport News police detective Trevor Buchanan showed the jury an extensive video presentation in which he superimposed cell phone tracking data onto a Newport News satellite map, then merged it with video surveillance footage from various sources.

The footage showed what investigators believe to be Jackson’s Nissan SUV at two Jefferson Avenue traffic signals — at the intersections of Mercury Boulevard and Oyster Point Road.

Buchanan combined that with Ring home security footage and grainy surveillance camera footage from Menchville High School and B.C. Charles Elementary School.

The video showed the SUV had its headlights on as it traveled toward the Shabazzes’ home just after 2 a.m. But on the way out of the neighborhood — just after the shooting — the SUV’s main headlights were off, the video showed.

Buchanan also testified that around that time, the data shows that Pettway’s and Jackson’s cell phones lost connection to the mobile phone network nearly simultaneously. Prosecutors assert that they turned them off to cover their tracks.

A few days later, prosecutors said, Jackson texted Pettway that he “was there” for her when no one else was, and “you didn’t hesitate.” When he texted back that he was “the protector,” Jackson replied they were “Bonnie and Clyde forever.”

But Pettway’s attorney, James Ellenson, contends that police arrested the wrong man — and that Shabazz’s wife was the real killer.

Ellenson said evidence shows that Jaqueline Shabazz had gunshot residue on her hand the night her husband was killed. (The prosecution contends she picked that up in a police vehicle while being taken to police headquarters that night).

Ellenson asserts that she killed Sal Shabazz to collect $156,000 in life insurance proceeds and to be with another mail carrier, a man with whom she was having a long-term extramarital relationship.

In fact, Ellenson maintains that the ongoing feud between Jacqueline Shabazz and Jackson stemmed from that relationship — with the lawyer asserting that Jackson was good friends with the wife of the man Shabazz was seeing.

Shabazz denied that was the source of the friction, asserting that she and the man kept their relationship under wraps. She also testified that she didn’t know about her husband’s life insurance policy until after he died.

The trial featured hundreds of text messages — some of them sexually explicit — between Jacqueline Shabazz and the mail carrier with whom she was having the affair.

The messages showed the two were communicating extensively while her family was in Las Vegas over Easter weekend.

“I love you forever,” the man wrote to Jacqueline Shabazz on March 31.

“I love you and want the same,” she replied from Las Vegas.

On the witness stand Tuesday, Jacqueline Shabazz initially downplayed her relationship with the co-worker, first calling him just a “friend,” before admitting she was having sex with him regularly and that the two were sending each other heartfelt messages.

When prosecutors attempted to keep the text messages out of the trial, Newport News Circuit Court Judge Gary Mills ruled that Ellenson was within his rights to bring them in because they go to the heart of the defense theory of the case — that the wife did it.

Mills also said the prosecution “opened the door” to the messages when he said Shabazz’s testimony “minimized” her relationship with the co-worker.

Ellenson also pointed out that Shabazz had a hand injury on the night her husband died, which she said was the result of striking something at home.

He also noted that Shabazz took out a protective order on her husband in March 2020, telling a magistrate that he punched her in the face when he believed she lied about her whereabouts that day. Ellenson also introduced evidence about a September 2017 incident in which she accused her husband of head-butting her after “finding a message” from someone else.

During her testimony Tuesday, Shabazz at first denied that she told police officers on April 7 about problems in her marriage or that they had talked of a divorce. But she backtracked after Ellenson played body camera footage of her telling officers just that.

After Ellenson asserted that Shabazz killed her husband, prosecutors sought to disabuse jurors of that notion.

“Did you want your husband murdered?” Donner asked.

“Not at all,” Shabazz replied.

“Did you murder your husband?” the prosecutor continued.

“Absolutely not,” she said. Though “we didn’t have a perfect marriage,” she said, she meant her husband no harm.

Sal Shabazz’s family said he was a U.S. Army veteran who worked as a forklift operator at a local warehouse. He was the father of four daughters — ages 9 through 16 — with Jacqueline Shabazz, and has a 22-year-old son, Amere Dozier, in Indiana from a prior relationship.

A murder case against Jackson is also pending in Newport News, with her trial scheduled for March. Pettway’s trial continues Thursday.

Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com