Four North Carolina men involved in the 2016 murder of a Virginia woman who was gunned down as she wheeled her trash container to the curb were sentenced Friday to life without parole, according to reports.
The sentences were handed down in U.S. District Court to 39-year-old Jaquate Simpson, 39-year-old Landis Jackson, 36-year-old Kalub Shipman, and 33-year-old Nelson Evans.
Simpson and Jackson had been running a multimillion-dollar drug ring in Greensboro, North Carolina, that worked with a Mexican cartel to supply hundreds of kilos of cocaine to central North Carolina and Hampton Roads.
Shipman was a member of the Bloods gang who helped carry out the murder of 59-year-old Lillian “Resa” Bond outside her Norfolk home, and Evans was the hired hitman who shot her.
The defendants were convicted at the end of a 2½-week trial in March on a variety of murder, conspiracy and drug trafficking charges. Federal law required they be sentenced to life without parole.
Testimony at trial showed that Bond’s nephew, Brandon Williams, had stolen two kilos of cocaine valued at $81,000 from a woman who worked with Simpson and Jackson.
In retaliation, the men hired a hitman to kill “anyone who came out” of the house where Williams lived. Shipman and Evans agreed to take the job, and were offered $10,000 for each person killed.
Williams was staying with Bond at her Ingleside area home at the time.
Bond, 59, a grandmother who’d worked as a housekeeping supervisor at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters for many years, died at the scene. Prosecutors have said she was unaware of the trouble in which her nephew was involved.
“Simpson ordered the murder of Lillian Bond and forever destroyed a family just to respond to a monetary debt he never planned on recouping,” prosecutors John Butler, Kristin Bird and Joseph DePadilla wrote in a position paper filed in Simpson’s case.
“This was not about money – it was about power and respect.”
A neighbor testified at trial that Bond was taking her trash can to the curb when a Lexus sedan with North Carolina plates pulled up.
The neighbor said he heard several shots after seeing a man with a gun get out of the passenger side.
The case remained cold for years, until a woman who’d worked with Simpson and Jackson was charged in another case and offered to provide information about Bond’s murder in exchange for leniency.
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