Prosecutors hoped his brother's testimony would condemn him. It did the opposite.
WEST PALM BEACH — As a courtroom clerk read the verdict aloud, Lawrence Padgett started to cry.
Jurors found the 31-year-old Royal Palm Beach man not guilty of third-degree felony murder on Jan. 26, almost six years after he accidentally shot and killed Jevaughn Suckoo while trying to wrestle a gun from his hands.
The fight stemmed from a dispute over money. Padgett said he met Suckoo at his West Palm Beach apartment on July 11, 2017, to buy marijuana but called off the deal because of the drug’s poor quality. That angered Suckoo, Padgett said, and he drew a gun.
"I didn't go up there to harm nobody,” Padgett said after the trial. “When I came home from work that day, I was supposed to buy pot, and me and my brothers thought we was going to play basketball right before they go off to college."
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Instead, they spent the evening dressing a gunshot wound in the arm of Padgett’s younger brother, Marqavious McCatty. He had followed Padgett into the apartment after deciding the drug deal had taken too long, then threw himself between the two men when he saw them fighting.
The gun in Padgett’s hand discharged, a bullet traveling through McCatty’s arm and into Suckoo’s head.
Suckoo’s girlfriend, the mother of his 2-year-old daughter, returned home to find Suckoo dead in the living room. She gave birth to twins three days later and died of an infection from her C-section on the day of Suckoo’s funeral.
The maximum penalty for third-degree felony murder — unintentionally killing someone while committing, or attempting to commit, a nonviolent felony — is 15 years in prison. Assistant State Attorney Chrichet Mixon offered Padgett a nine-year deal in exchange for pleading guilty and forgoing a trial. He turned it down.
The evidence didn’t support the charge, said Padgett’s defense attorney, Scott Skier. The fight that led to Suckoo’s death began after Padgett called the drug deal off, he said; not as a sale was being carried out.
Prosecutors called Padgett’s brother to testify against him, but Skier said even his testimony underscored Padgett’s defense. Jurors rejected the felony murder theory. To convict him of manslaughter instead, Mixon would have needed to prove that Padgett acted unreasonably when he tried defending himself from Suckoo. Jurors rejected that theory, too.
Padgett, a Wellington High School graduate with no felony convictions, returned home to his wife and daughter in the wake of his murder trial, feeling relieved. He’d been forbidden from leaving, even to work or to drive his toddler to day care, for three years.
Within a week, he landed a job in construction.
“I want to help out my wife. She'd been doing this for three years, taking care of all the work, all the bills,” Padgett said Tuesday. “So you know I went straight to work.”
Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Lawrence Padgett found not guilty of felony murder for fatal 2017 shooting
