11-year-old remembers the day he watched his father kill his mother in Newport News murder trial

A 6-year-old boy was in his bedroom playing with his toys more than five years ago when someone knocked on the door to the family’s Newport News home.

He walked out of his room to see what was going on.

“My dad started shooting ... and I saw my dad coming inside the house,” the boy testified Friday, five years later. He said his mother, Patricia “Tricia” Joseph, “had gotten shot to the ground.”

The boy, now 11, testified that his grandfather, Jessie Abraham Barnes, had been sitting on the living room couch and attempted to find cover from the gunshots.

“I followed my grandpa, because I saw him running to the bathroom,” the boy testified. Then, he said, his father chased Barnes into the bathroom and shot him, too.

Joseph, 29, was pronounced dead at the scene. Barnes died at Riverside Regional Medical Center a short time later.

Amos Jacob “A.J.” Arroyo, 36 — Joseph’s ex-boyfriend and the father of the couple’s two boys — is on trial for two counts of first-degree murder and other charges in the double slaying. His trial began this week in Newport News Circuit Court and will continue Monday.

The killings took place just after 6 p.m. on July 30, 2017, at a residence in the Chesapeake Village Mobile Home Park, off Bland Boulevard near the Newport News airport. Five people — Joseph, her two boys, her father and her new boyfriend — were relaxing and watching TV that Sunday evening.

The boyfriend, Jonathan Yeanan, testified that he’d been dating Joseph for about five or six months. He said he was getting ready to leave when they heard the knocks, with Joseph doing to answer it.

“She looked out the window, and said, ‘Oh my God,’” Yeanan relayed in a 911 call to police after fleeing the home. “Next thing you know, shots fired ... She said, ‘Oh, my God, he shot me.’”

As the shots were fired, Yeanan, a Navy sailor then living in Virginia Beach, said he ran into a nearby bedroom and hid in a closet. A man he contends was Arroyo later walked into the bedroom, he said, but didn’t see him hiding.

After Arroyo fled, Yeanan fled to a wooded area behind the home. During the call, he told a 911 dispatcher that he overheard the couple’s son asking his father an urgent question.

“Did you kill Mommy? Did you kill Mommy?” the boy asked. “Why did you do that?”

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Arroyo replied, Yeanan told the dispatcher.

Arroyo’s defense lawyers objected to that conversation being relayed, calling it inadmissible hearsay. Though Newport News Circuit Judge Tyneka Flythe agreed and barred the testimony, jurors still heard it later when prosecutors played the 911 call.

After the shooting, the 11-year-old boy said he ran to the neighbor’s house. But he said he soon went back to his home to get his 1-year-old brother, who by then was in the hallway “near my mom.”

Police recovered eight shell casings outside the home.

Arroyo sobbed at the defense table Thursday when prosecutors played police body camera footage from inside the trailer showing Joseph and Barnes on the floor. His attorney, Cathy Krinick, put her hand on his shoulder.

Arroyo fled the state after the shooting, police say.

The next day, his car was found abandoned in a Walmart parking lot off Interstate 95 in Georgia, with surveillance footage capturing him in the store buying a backpack and hooded sweatshirt. Officers also found his birth certificate, car registration and a handgun in the car.

Investigators say he spent more than five months on the lam.

Though it wasn’t clear where he was in August and September of 2017, he showed up in Lamesa, Texas, that October, telling residents he was “just passing through” and that “God wants me just to travel and help people.”

Using the alias “Aren James Peters,” Arroyo stayed in Lamesa — a cattle ranching town of 10,000 south of Lubbock — for more than three months.

He ministered in a local church, volunteered at the ministry store and at church fundraisers, worked some remodeling jobs and began dating a woman he met at the church. A friend and co-worker said in 2018 that he sometimes broke down crying when Christian music came on the radio.

On Jan. 31, a couple of weeks after federal marshals issued a nationwide alert for him, Arroyo turned himself in with the help of a church friend.

“He had the look that something was on his mind,” the friend, Tommy Barbour, told the Daily Press in 2018. “I said, ‘Is something wrong? What’s up?’ … Then he said, ‘I want you, Tommy, to help me turn myself in today.’” Barbour agreed and helped to do that, saying he was “proud of him as a Christian for doing the right thing.”

More than four years later, Arroyo’s 11-year-old son clearly provided crucial prosecution testimony.

The student at Mary Passage Middle School in Newport News was a bit nervous — swaying back and forth on the stand — but was calm and largely kept his composure.

A deputy gave the boy tissues at one point, and Judge Flythe poured him a cup of water.

“Take a sip, and take your time,” she told him.

A “witness advocate” with the Newport News prosecutor’s office sat behind him on the stand for support.

Even Krinick, Arroyo’s defense lawyer, sought to make the boy comfortable as she began her cross-examination. The 69-year-old attorney told the boy she shared his May birthday, but asked if he thought she was a lot older than him.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t,” he said.

“That was very diplomatic of you,” Krinick replied lightheartedly.

After his testimony, the boy returned to a room where he sat with his uncle to await possibly being recalled to the stand.

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