SALISBURY — The families of Sabrina Curzi and Allen Wright who were in court Thursday morning got to hear individual jurors state their commitment to the unanimous verdict of guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for Willie Earl Williams Jr.

Williams, when the court received notice that the jury had a verdict, had placed his hands together and looked heavenward, but it was likely not the outcome he prayed for.

On Aug. 3, 2018, at Towne Creek Park on East Monroe Street, Curzi and Wright went to try to help Curzi’s 19-year-old son Michael, or as he was known, Mikey. He had called his mother and told her he’d been beaten and robbed.

When the couple arrived, things went awry, an altercation occurred, and Curzi and Wright were shot and killed, all in a matter of minutes.

Police arrived on the scene to find the two victims and no one else. They began to put the evidence together and developed suspects. Two men were arrested fairly quickly: Eugene William Black, then 24, and Ronald Earl Powers, then 32. Both were charged with common law robbery and Powers was also charged with assault inflicting serious bodily injury. Mikey had been reportedly beaten with a beer bottle and his cell phone had been stolen.

Police obtained a warrant for Willie Earl Williams Jr., then 33, for the homicides. Almost two months passed before Greenville police and officers from the N.C. State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) located Williams in Greenville and arrested him. He was held in Pitt County until he could be extradited to Rowan County, where he was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, along with robbery and assault charges that would later be dismissed.

Fast forward six years, jury selection begins in Williams trial, and a slightly different story would be told.

Assistant District Attorney Caleb Newman, who prosecuted the case with assistance from ADA Johnna Shumate, outlined a list of possible witnesses, but in the end, did not present them all. There were SBI agents, Salisbury police detectives, including lead detective Jeremy Hill, a DNA analysis expert and a gun expert among them, but the witness whose testimony was most damaging for Williams and strongest for the state was Mary Katherine Maria “Kat” Adkins. Adkins was Williams’ girlfriend at the time of the shootings, and it was to her residence Williams and several others in the gang went following the shooting.

The state explained it was known Williams went to Adkins’ address because he had on an ankle monitor from a previous case. The monitor showed Williams had been at the park from just before 3 p.m. until 4:11 p.m., just five minutes after a 911 operator heard shots fired on the phone Wright had called from.

According to Adkins, she was not at the park when the shooting happened, but was home putting on makeup to get ready to go to Winston-Salem with a friend. Williams and Powers, she said, came inside her home, with Powers assisting Williams who had been shot in the neck. Powers, whose nickname was “Cease,” had a black handgun, she said, that he eventually threw on the roof of her mother’s shed behind the house. Police did find the gun exactly where she told them it would be. She said Williams told her he had “caught two bodies,” meaning he had killed two people. She told police that night she and Williams slept in the woods outside a hotel because he was so afraid of getting caught. It took days for him to recover from the wound in his neck.

He told her he was going to Greenville, S.C., to get away, to stay with people he knew. He asked her to come, and she went, saying she “didn’t have anywhere else to be.” But after weeks passed, the two had a “big fight, and I ran away, and a friend picked me up,” Adkins testified. She then contacted Salisbury police and told them where they could find Williams.

Adkins testified in court that she went to police “a week or two weeks” after the shooting, because she knew they were looking for her, but Hill, now a lieutenant, testified that she came to see police on Aug. 6 and 7, just three days after the shooting.

She was afraid, she testified, because Williams “told me he’d have me killed if I testified.”

Adkins told the court that Mikey’s story was not quite the truth. Williams had told her Mikey had agreed to take a beating to join the gang during a cookout that day at the park. He then called his mother, Curzi, afterward, claiming he had been beaten and robbed instead.

Curzi then contacted Wright, with whom she previously had a relationship, and asked him to help.

Wright owned a 9mm Glock handgun which he brought with him and which Curzi then took possession of as they were searching for Mikey. She also had a large can of Bear Spray with capsaicin in it.

Adkins said Williams told her no one who was at the cookout that day had any weapons with them, since several people were on ankle monitors and they didn’t want a problem.

It might have been less clear what happened when the two confronted the group of about 10 men at the park having a cookout, but Wright had called 911 when they arrived, telling police his son had called and told him he had been assaulted and Wright wanted police and EMS to come.

The 911 call was also introduced into evidence, and in the approximate three-minute call, everything unfolds in rapid order.

The dispatcher is heard asking Wright if his son is breathing. Wright replied that he did not yet see his son. The dispatcher says he will remain on the phone until Wright locates him, and says he has help on the way. In the background, Curzi can be heard, yelling, until she is heard confronting someone. She fires a shot, and hits Nairobi Mason, known as “Gunna,” in the backside. At the same time it appears someone punches Wright and his “knees buckled,” according to Adkins description of what Williams told her. Curzi screams for someone to “get the f*** away from us, I’ll do it again, I’ll kill you,” while Wright can be heard shouting for Curzi to “give me my gun, you don’t understand.” Curzi fires another shot, this time hitting Williams in the back of his neck. At this time, Williams told Adkins that Curzi had sprayed the pepper spray and he could not see, and had stuff coming out of his nose and watering eyes. In just a matter of seconds, you then hear two gunshots one after the other and Wright is silent. Curzi is screaming “No! No!” She again screams “No! Please don’t shoot me,” before three gunshots in rapid succession are fired.

The dispatcher can be heard telling police to get to the scene as he has now heard shots fired and he says initially he still has Wright on the phone, but then says he has “an open line.” There are a few muffled or distant voices then nothing. All that can be heard is the dispatcher saying, “Hello? Hello?”

According to Adkins, Williams said he told Curzi it was “your son’s business, you need to leave” and that he tried to de-escalate the situation, but that is not heard on the 911 call. You can hear a man with a deep voice similar to Williams’ saying, “What’s up? What’s up?” at the start of the altercation.

Williams told Adkins, according to her testimony, that Wright took the first swing at him, and he hit back. When he got pepper sprayed, he said he was fighting to even open his eyes, and when he did, Curzi was pointing the gun at his head. He said he ducked and the bullet hit him in the back of the neck. He said he then managed to wrestle the gun away from Curzi before shooting Wright, who was on the ground after being hit. Then he shot Curzi, who was running back toward the truck she and Wright had arrived in.

Testimony from the gun expert confirmed that the bullets and casings found at the scene were fired from Wright’s gun, which was found at Adkins’ property. An expert from the GPS company confirmed that an ankle monitor found on Bringle Ferry Road near Williams’ residence was the one that had been attached to Williams in March. She also confirmed that monitor had alerted Williams’ parole officer that someone had cut the monitor off at 4:11 p.m.

In closing arguments, Newman reminded the jury that though the evidence was all circumstantial, they had agreed at the beginning to consider all evidence equally, whether it was direct evidence or circumstantial. He pointed out that once Williams had taken the gun from Curzi, “he was in charge of the situation, because he now had the only weapon there.” He noted that Curzi was running away from Williams, begging for her life, when Williams shot her in the back and in the head and tried to shoot her a third time. Either shot, he reminded them, would have been fatal according to her autopsy.

Wright had been shot at point-blank range in the forehead, even though he was down from the punch, Newman said. He said that Williams had the choice to let them go, but did not.

Doug Smith, defense attorney for Williams, reminded the jury that in America, everyone “is presumed innocent. It is not the defendant’s job to prove his innocence, it is the government’s job to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Newman described the evidence as pieces of a puzzle, saying “even with some pieces missing you can see the big picture.” He said facts are stubborn, and that Adkins had testified despite Williams’ threats and much of her testimony had been corroborated, at least in part, by the evidence. He said innocent people don’t “run to the other side of the state, with no intention of coming back.”

But Smith told jurors to remember that they “are the sole judges of the weight to be given any evidence,” and the sole judges of what is actually fact and what is evidence or opinion. He told them they would decide if Curzi’s first shot was in fact a warning shot, or something else.

“The burden is on the state to prove beyond reasonable doubt” that the defendant is guilty, Smith reiterated. “The defendant is presumed innocent and cannot be penalized for remaining silent or not putting on evidence. The fact that he has remained silent is not to be considered.”

“The issue you must start with is identification,” Smith continued. “Part of what I’m asking you to consider is sufficiency. Have you been given all the evidence?”

Jurors were given their instructions at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 18, and during the afternoon had three questions for Judge William Stetzer. First they asked to see Wright’s autopsy photos again and they asked to have the transcript of the testimony from the gun expert. Stetzer allowed them the photos, but denied the transcript, reminding them that it was their job “to remember the testimony even if it wasn’t pointed out to you.” They then asked to hear the 911 recording again, asking the state to increase the volume because some had not been able to hear it all clearly.

They left for the day undecided, but when they returned Wednesday morning, they deliberated just half an hour before returning with two guilty verdicts.

Following the verdict, two family members spoke on behalf of the victims. Wright’s father, in a motorized chair due to complications from multiple sclerosis, struggled to speak. He said after living with this for six years, there have been adjustments, learning to live with it, but the pain never goes away.

“I’ve waited so long to speak, and now I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Allen was a good man, who would help anyone with anything.” He paused, and then said, “I can’t think of anything I could say that anyone here would understand.” He did add that he knows courts and law enforcement hear a lot of negative things, but that everyone in the court and the deputies had been nothing but kind and courteous and he wanted that on the record.

Curzi’s cousin stood and spoke about the loss to the family, her voice loud with hurt. She said Curzi “had her flaws, but she loved her kids.” And she said now her grandchildren “will never know her.” But she said her family does not hate Williams, that her family is “about love, and we don’t hate you. I hope you find Jesus, and find peace with what you have done.”

Williams spoke briefly, saying he was glad the family had no ill will toward him, and “doesn’t look at me as a monster because I’m not.” He was sorry for the family’s pain and loss, but said “I’m not a killer.” As he was taken from the court in handcuffs, he looked back at a woman who is the mother of his son and said, “I’ll be back.”

“It’s not closure, but it is a tremendous weight off my chest, I can breathe,” said Curzi’s cousin, who asked not to be named because the family still fears retribution. “We are sorry for Allen’s family. He was a good man and he loved Sabrina, and we will never forget her.”

Filing for an appeal is in process.