The prosecutor pulled a small cardboard box out of a paper evidence bag and waved it for the jury, declaring that it must've held the most valuable pizza in the world.
It was worth more, she said, than 28 years of Shane Varnadore's life. More than the hard work he put in delivering pizzas to provide for himself and for his widowed mother. More than the love that mother had.
"This pizza," the prosecutor, Sabrina Nizam, said, "meant more to Reginald Lofton than Shane Varnadore did. And that’s pretty pathetic."
Nizam's fiery, hour-long closing argument marked the end of the fourth day of the trial of Reginald Lofton, whose fate will be placed in the hands of a Gwinnett County jury when it begins deliberations Friday morning. Lofton was just 14 years old on March 1 when, authorities believe, he and a friend lured Varnadore to a building at their Lawrenceville-area apartment complex under the guise of a simple delivery.
Varnadore wound up dead. Lofton wound up as an adult, legally speaking — a boy facing three different counts of murder, plus aggravated assault and armed robbery.
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The prosecution spent the week presenting evidence they say proves Lofton provided the phone used to make the order that led to Varnadore's death, and that he provided the murder weapon, and that he served as the lookout. They readily admitted that they don't definitively know whether Lofton or his friend, 21-year-old Jermaine Young, actually shot and killed Varnadore, but hammered home that it didn't matter.
Under Georgia's party to a crime laws, anyone who aids, abets or encourages a crime that ends with someone's death can be charged with murder.
"[Lofton] provided the phone. He provided the gun," Nizam said, a poster with the words "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER" mounted behind her. "Without those two things nothing would have happened."
Defense attorney LeAnne Chancey, meanwhile, spent the trial — and her closing argument — picking apart small inconsistencies in the state's case and pointing to Young as the only culprit.
She pointed to the fact that investigators didn't attempt to take fingerprints from bullets in the murder weapon, which was found in a box of pancake mix in the apartment Lofton, Young and several other people shared with her client's sister. She found the lack of gun shot residue testing odd.
Above all, she pointed to Lofton's interrogation with Gwinnett County police Investigator Matthew Kenck. She argued that the story her client eventually told — that he knew what was going on but didn't participate, watched from a stairwell and stupidly snatched up the abandoned pizza after Varnadore was killed — was the true one.
"He did what every teenager who did not want to be involved in his buddy's stupid scheme would have done," Chancey told the jury. "He went upstairs. In the mind of a 14-year-old, that’s not participating."
"Knowing about a plan," she added, "is not the same thing as being a willing participant in that plan."
Nizam, meanwhile, addressed the jury while standing in front of blown up pictures of Lofton, four photos taken from his Facebook page that showed him posing with different firearms. One taken just hours before Varnadore's death, authorities believe, shows him pointing the murder weapon toward the eye of the camera.
The menacing nickname he used on Facebook loomed in big blue letters.
"There’s only one person who put himself in that position, who put himself in that chair," Nizam said. "And that is Rayray da Shoota."
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