The Yella Beezy Trial After Three Days: Mo3's Murder Proved Many Times Over, the Hire Still Without a Witness

Melvin Noble was running north on Interstate 35 a little before noon on November 11, 2020, in a purple jumpsuit, with a masked man and a rifle behind him. The world knew him as Mo3. He made it past a neurosurgeon's car and fell in front of a software saleswoman's bumper, and he was dead before the ambulance could get around the gridlock his killing had caused. Three days into the Yella Beezy trial, a Dallas County jury has now heard that morning told from four windshields, a fire engine, an autopsy table and three crime scene notebooks. Nobody in that courtroom is arguing about whether Mo3 was murdered.

That is the thing to hold onto, because it is not what this trial is about. Markies Conway, the Dallas rapper who performs as Yella Beezy, is not charged with shooting anyone. He is charged with capital murder for hire: the State says he employed Kewon White to kill Mo3 for money, or for the promise of money. White has already been tried. A Dallas County jury convicted him in September and he is serving life without parole, and Conway's own lawyer called White the shooter in the defense opening. So the question in front of this jury is narrow and it is hard. Did Markies Conway make an agreement to pay for this killing, and did money, or a promise of it, move from him because of it?

After three court days, sixteen witnesses before Thursday and several more on Thursday, the honest answer is that the jury has not yet heard a single piece of evidence on that question. Not one witness has put Conway in a room with White. Not one record has moved a dollar from Conway toward anyone. And on Thursday afternoon, with the jury out of the courtroom, the man the State brought in to tell them about Conway took the Fifth to every question he was asked, while the judge raised the fact that he has recanted. That is where this case stands going into Friday, and it is the story of these three days.

What the State has to prove, in plain English

The indictment was read to the jury on Tuesday morning, and it is the whole case in two sentences. It says that on or about November 11, 2020, Markies Conway intentionally and knowingly caused the death of Melvin Noble by employing Kewon White to murder him, for remuneration and the promise of remuneration, namely United States currency from the defendant, and that White, under that agreement, shot and killed him with a firearm.

Break that into pieces and you have what the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt. First, a murder: someone intentionally or knowingly killed Melvin Noble. Second, that Conway employed the killer. Third, that it was for money or the promise of money, and the State chose to plead the money as cash from Conway himself. Fourth, that Conway intended the killing to be done. The first piece is why the jury has seen thirteen rifle wounds and forty-four shell casings. The last three pieces are why Markies Conway is sitting at the defense table, and they are the only pieces he contests.

The stakes were said out loud on the first morning. A conviction here carries one sentence, life without parole; the State is not seeking death. The defense told the jury that plainly, and it is why it asked them to hold the State to the full weight of the burden.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 1 Murder for Hire or Tunnel Vision? The Yella Beezy Trial Opens Over Rapper Mo3's Death / Pt 1

Two openings, one picture puzzle

The State's opening was short. The prosecutor asked for fifteen minutes and used about five. It put the jury on I-35 at noon in the middle of the pandemic, introduced Mo3 first as a father and a son and only then as a rapper known well beyond Dallas, and described the killing in one long breath: a masked man jumping out of a Camaro with an AK-style weapon, more than forty rounds fired as he chased Noble on foot across the freeway. Then the prosecutor told them that was not where the story starts. The story, the State said, is a feud between Mo3 and Yella Beezy that ran through 2017, 2018 and 2019 and escalated until it ended on the highway, played out in public where everybody could see it. The jury will hear from the ATF, the FBI and the Texas Department of Public Safety, from travel records and texts and from videos in the defendant's own words. And it asked for patience: the evidence would come in pieces, like a picture puzzle, and only at the end would it all make sense.

The defense took the puzzle and turned it around. The pieces will come in, the lawyer said, but they will never remove the reasonable doubt on the one thing that matters: that Markies Conway ever agreed to pay money for Melvin Noble's death, then or later. There will be gaps, and the State will ask you to fill them with assumptions. The gaps are the doubt.

Then the defense did something defenses rarely do. It laid out the State's own money theory in more detail than the State had. Nine days after the killing, on November 20, 2020, Conway, back from promotional work in Los Angeles, withdrew forty thousand dollars in cash from a bank in Frisco. The State's theory, as the defense told it, is that an old high-school friend of Conway's took that cash two days later to a drug house on Ramona in South Dallas and paid Kewon White, and that White then headed for East Texas, got stopped doing 107 miles an hour, and had $9,700 in the car. The defense's answer was the bills. Bank cash comes out in crisp hundreds and fifties. White's money was mostly fives, ones and tens. That is drug money, the lawyer said, from a house where money changed hands every day.

And the defense pointed somewhere else: at Devin Brown, the man the State says located Mo3 that morning. Brown is also indicted. The woman Mo3 had just left was the mother of Brown's two sons, and in September 2020 Mo3 had posted video of those boys wearing his chains and holding his money. Brown blocked her afterward. Brown ran his own drug house, had his own cash, and met White two days before the killing. Nobody ever investigated him as the man who paid, the defense said. It also told the jury to watch the lead detective, Eric Barnes, who it said had decided within days, before White was even arrested, that the rapper paid.

Here is what I want you to notice about those two openings, because it frames everything since. The forty thousand dollars is not in evidence. The jury heard about it only from the lawyers. Three days later, that is still true.

A mother and four names

The first witness was Mo3's mother. Nichole Noble was nervous and the prosecutor told her they would get through it together. She brought three photographs: her son with his three children in 2019, the two of them on what she called her last birthday with her baby, a trip to Las Vegas he paid for, and one she introduced as "my superstar." He took his stage name from his father, who rapped as Three; the boy was Little Three until he grew up. He left her house on November 9 to shoot a video in California and told her he would be back on the 11th. She found out on the way to bingo, from a phone full of missed calls.

Then the question the State had built toward. When the police came to the hospital, did she give them any names? Four, she said. Her son's manager, Brandon Rainwater. A man named Sean Griffin who was often with him. And two Dallas rappers she knew only by their stage names, Trapboy Freddy and Yella Beezy. She pointed to the defendant in the burgundy suit as the man she knew by that second name.

That testimony is powerful and it is limited, and both things matter. The State used it to put Yella Beezy's name into the record on the day of the killing, through the most sympathetic witness it has. It is not evidence that Conway did anything; it is evidence of what she told the police. And it cuts the other way too. She gave them four names, including her son's own manager. The defense has been asking ever since, without quite saying it yet: what did the police do with the other three?

On cross, the defense kept it gentle and made two points that would come back on every day of this trial. Her son paid for things in cash, as rappers do. And Mo3 was a character, a stage persona, different from the son she knew at home.

WATCH THE CLIP Mo3's Mother Testifies She Gave Police Four Names and Yella Beezy Was One of Them

The freeway, seen from four windshields

Tamitha Hopkins did not want to be there; she was under subpoena. She was driving north on I-35 to a car-service appointment when a black car came up fast behind her and weaved through traffic without ever passing. She heard popping and thought a tire had blown. Traffic stopped, and she did what a decent person does: she pulled up beside the black car and rolled her window down to ask if the driver was okay. He was getting out, pulling a mask down, holding what looked to her like an assault rifle. He cursed her and told her to get out of there. She floored it and called 911 with the gunfire still going behind her. The jury heard that call, and then watched a dash-camera video from a truck that day in which she picked out the tan sedan, the black sports car and her own silver BMW.

On that 911 call she told the dispatcher she could see his face. She was never shown a photo lineup. She was never brought downtown. Months later a detective she could not name phoned her and asked her to repeat what she had said on the call, and that was the whole of her contact with the investigation. The State brought that out itself, and the reason is plain: the defense agrees White was the shooter, so a missing lineup costs the State nothing on the elements in dispute. But hold it in your mind anyway. The one civilian who looked the gunman in the face was never asked who he was. That is a fact about how this case was investigated, and the defense is building a theme out of exactly those facts.

WATCH THE CLIP Yella Beezy Trial Jury Hears the Eyewitness 911 Call Then Watches the I-35 Dashcam Video

Tracey Kappler was a few cars back. She saw two men running down the freeway, the one behind firing a very large gun at the one in front, and she put her car in park, got down on the floorboard and prayed. When the shooting stopped, the man in the purple jumpsuit was lying in front of her car, still moving. Her iPhone took live photos, a few seconds of motion around each still, and over a defense objection that they were there only to inflame, the judge let them in. The jury watched Melvin Noble on the asphalt, still alive.

On Wednesday the jury met the man who had been shot at too. Dr. Randall Graham, a brain and spine surgeon, came to court in his scrubs. He was driving between hospitals when a man sprinted past his passenger side, something exploded into his face and neck, and a second man with a rifle stopped at his headlight, fired two or three more times, and for an instant looked straight at him before running back. Glass and shrapnel were in the doctor's neck. He got out of his car anyway, saw a man down in the road, and started chest compressions. Mo3 was still breathing, the doctor said, but it was agonal breathing, the body's last involuntary gasps when the brain has been starved of blood. In his whole career he could not recall anyone presenting like that and surviving. The man he was trying to save had been lying beside his own back wheel the whole time.

WATCH THE CLIP Brain Surgeon Testifies He Locked Eyes With the Masked Gunman on I-35 in the Yella Beezy Trial

The defense asked him nothing. That was a deliberate choice, and it was the right one. Nothing the surgeon saw touches who hired the gunman, and he is the most sympathetic witness the jury has heard. It was one of several State witnesses the defense let walk off the stand without a single question, and each of those silences says the same thing: we are not disputing the shooting.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 5 Yella Beezy Trial Brain Surgeon Testifies He Tried to Save Mo3 With Glass in His Neck / Pt 5

The fire captain who reached Noble, Chris Bloodgood, told the jury his engine only got there because the driver cut through the closed construction lanes; the ambulance was stuck in the gridlock and confused about where the scene was. The monitor showed a flat line from the moment they connected it to the moment they reached Methodist Dallas. And the retired chief medical examiner, Dr. Jeffrey Barnard, walked the jury through thirteen rifle wounds, most of them entering from behind, the most quickly fatal one going in through the left back and through the spleen, stomach, lung and heart. He would not put the shots in order, and he explained why: wounds in the back, the front and the side mean the man was moving and so was the shooter. Cause of death, multiple rifle wounds. Manner, homicide.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 2 The Yella Beezy Jury Hears Mo3's Last Minutes on I-35 From the Driver Who Hid to the Autopsy / Pt 2

The money keeps turning up in the wrong pockets

The defense had exactly one subject for the medical examiner, and it was money. In the bag with Mo3's body came eighteen hundred-dollar bills, two fives and two ones. Crisp, the lawyer suggested, not like wallet money. Not crumpled, the doctor allowed. Unusual to find that much cash on a body? Yes.

On Wednesday the crime scene analyst who processed Mo3's gold Honda at the police auto pound told the jury what was in it: a backpack with a jewelry box full of chains, rings and watches; his driver's license; money in a pair of jeans, money tucked in the driver's door, some of it torn by gunfire; and a child's play passport, shot through. Total cash, $17,960. Nobody took any of it. On cross, the defense got the count of the hundreds: one hundred twenty-four of them, twelve thousand four hundred dollars, looking new.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 6 Yella Beezy Trial Crime Scene Analyst Testifies He Found $17,960 in Mo3's Gold Honda / Pt 6

Think about what the defense is doing with that. The State's opening promised that this case is about cash moving to pay for a killing. The defense has now shown the jury, through the State's own witnesses, that the dead man himself carried crisp hundreds, thousands of dollars of them, and that the alleged shooter carried fives and tens. Crisp bank money is not a fingerprint. If the State ever puts the Frisco withdrawal into evidence, it will meet a jury that has already learned that crisp hundreds were everywhere in this story except where the State needs them.

The money in Mo3's car is also, I think, the strongest thing the State has on the nature of this killing. A gunman who leaves nearly eighteen thousand dollars and a box of jewelry in an open car was not there to rob anyone. That points to a targeted killing. It does not point to who paid for one, and the State has been careful never to say that it does.

The woman between two men

The longest witness of the first day, and still the most important, was Jocelyn Jackson. She did not want to be there either. She is the mother of Devin Brown's two sons; she calls him Chicago, because that is where he is from. She left him in 2018 and moved without telling him where. In the middle of 2020 she started seeing Mo3. He came over to bowl and to play Connect 4 with her boys, and he was good at it.

Her younger son's birthday is in September. She did not invite Mo3 to the party in 2020, because Devin was going to be there and she was not ready to put the two of them in a room. Before that party Mo3 posted the video of her boys wearing his chains and holding his money. Devin blocked her afterward. From then on, the only way Devin reached his sons was a phone her older boy, eight years old, kept in his room.

On Tuesday, November 10, Mo3 came back from California and came to her apartment. He spent the night. The next morning her older son asked whether he could see his father that day, a school day, out of nowhere. She said no. Mo3 left late morning. When she learned he was dead it struck her as strange that he was killed leaving her place, because nobody outside her family knew where she lived. So she asked her son: did you tell your daddy Three was over here? He said yes.

Then the State turned her story into records. Screenshots from her son's phone, with his father saved as "dad" and a green heart: an incoming call from Brown's Chicago number at 6:35 on the evening of November 10, three more within the next twenty-two minutes, and on the morning of the 11th calls at 10:48, 10:49 and 11:21. At 10:54 that morning her son texted her asking whether his daddy could take them to get something to eat. Lay that next to the apartment complex's surveillance camera, which the jury had seen an hour before: a black sports car arriving at 6:48 on the evening of the 10th, and on the 11th a tan car leaving at 11:45 and nineteen seconds, with the black car leaving twenty seconds behind it. Twenty-four minutes after the last call.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 3 Mo3's Girlfriend Tells the Yella Beezy Jury Her Ex Called Their Son the Day Mo3 Died / Pt 3

That is strong circumstantial evidence that Devin Brown located Mo3 through his own child. I think it is the most persuasive piece of the State's case so far. And notice who it is evidence against. Every link in it runs from Brown to the boy to the apartment to the freeway. None of it runs to Markies Conway.

The State knew that, which is why, for the first time since the openings, it turned Jackson toward the man on trial. Did she know of any public feud between Mo3 and other artists? Yes: a Trapboy and Yella. She identified Conway in court, and the judge let in photographs of Brown, Trapboy Freddy and Conway over a defense objection that there was no evidence of any conspiracy and the State was trying to push one in through a witness who knew nothing about one. The judge kept out two other photographs of men she knew from school.

Then the jury heard the first words from Devin Brown himself, in a text he sent after Jackson accused him, through her son's phone, of having something to do with Mo3's death. In substance he wrote that something like this can happen when there is beef in the city, that it could have been his kids who were killed, that he never cared who she dated, and that she had the nerve to try to put this on him.

WATCH THE CLIP Mo3's Girlfriend Reads Her Ex's Furious Reply After She Blamed Him in the Yella Beezy Trial

The cross that changed the motive

The defense cross of Jackson took most of Tuesday afternoon, and it did two things.

The first was to build a case against Devin Brown out of the State's own witness. Jackson agreed she called police on Brown in January 2017 over an assault, and six photographs of her injuries from that report went in over the State's objection. She agreed he had once pointed a gun at her. She agreed he dealt drugs. The defense put in pictures from his Instagram and Facebook accounts, the boys holding money, and then the chains video itself, played with the lights down, and then Brown's own post the day after the birthday party, his boys in his chains. When the lawyer asked what her suspicion of Brown was built on, she said it was based on who he was affiliated with and who he was around. Nobody else had her address, she said at the end. She felt he had given it up.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 4 Yella Beezy Defense Confronts Mo3's Girlfriend With Her Texts to Her Ex and the Chains Video / Pt 4

The second thing the cross did matters more, because it went at the only evidence the State has offered that touches Conway at all, which is motive. The defense showed Jackson the prosecution team's own notes from a preparation interview on August 17 of this year. The notes, turned over to the defense, recorded her as saying Mo3 never had issues with Yella. The judge let her read them. Her answer: she did not say that. She said Mo3 was not worried about Yella. The artist he really disliked, she said, was Freddie. Asked whether whoever wrote the notes would have written down accurately what was said, she said no: the notes are not accurate.

So look at where the motive evidence stands. The State's only witness to the feud, so far, is a woman who told the prosecutors' own note-taker something they wrote down as "never had issues" with Yella, and who now says the man Mo3 actually hated was somebody else. On redirect the State asked her one last question: on November 11, who did she tell the detectives she believed was involved? Trapboy Freddie and Yella, she said. On recross she could not remember whether she had told them that same day that Mo did not have a problem with Yella. Both versions are in the record now. A feud with two rappers, and a victim who was not worried about one of them, is not the same thing as a motive to hire a killer, and it is certainly not an agreement to pay one.

WATCH THE CLIP Woman Mo3 Was Dating Names His Public Feud and Identifies Yella Beezy in the Courtroom

Two smaller things came out of her cross that I want on the record. First, at White's trial in August she testified she did not even know what car Mo3 drove that day; in her 2020 police interview she told the detective it was a Honda, because she had to register the make, model and plate with the complex. She agreed on Tuesday that the interview was right. Second, Mo3's manager, Brandon Rainwater, had been in California with Mo3 right before he came to her place, spoke to him on the phone on November 10, and knew where he was staying. She had said nobody outside her family knew where she was. Now the jury knows at least one more person knew where Mo3 was.

WATCH: FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE SAT OCT 31, 11:00 AM CT Jocelyn Jackson: Full Testimony, Mo3's Girlfriend on the Leak and Her Ex / Yella Beezy Trial DAY 1, EVERY MINUTE: NO BREAKS EDITION Yella Beezy Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Openings, Mo3's Mother, Eyewitnesses

Following two cars toward the freeway

While the defense was building Devin Brown, the State was building a route. On Tuesday, the custodian for a camera company that watched an apartment complex identified video showing a gold or tan car arriving on November 10 in the early afternoon and a black car that looked like a sports car arriving that evening; then, on November 11, the tan car leaving at 11:45:19 and the black car at 11:45:39. On cross the defense asked whether visitors had to register their cars, with make, model and plate. They did, she said, with the apartment office, not with her company. Nobody had ever asked her for that.

On Wednesday the State filled in the rest. Vanessa Armenta, who lived upstairs from Jackson, explained the complex: one loop, one way in and out, residents in reserved spots, visitors parked by the office, and overnight guests registered on the complex's app with their plates. Her cheap window cameras had caught a black Camaro she did not recognize, backed in across from her building. The manager of a body shop a couple of miles from I-35 identified his own video from about 11:48 that morning: a Honda Accord, and about forty seconds behind it, a Chevrolet Camaro. And a Dallas police detective testified to a warrant for a tan 2018 Honda Accord, Mo3's car, closing the loop between the tan car on the complex video, the gold car on the freeway and the Honda at the pound.

WATCH THE CLIP Yella Beezy Trial Body Shop Manager's Camera Caught a Camaro 40 Seconds After a Honda Accord WATCH: CASE STORY PT 7 Mo3's Girlfriend's Upstairs Neighbor Shows the Yella Beezy Jury Her Camera Clips of a Camaro / Pt 7

The route is solid. A black Camaro waited overnight at the complex Brown's son had just told his father about, and followed Mo3's Honda toward the interstate. I would be surprised if any juror doubts it. But a question sits under it, and the defense keeps putting its finger on it: the complex required overnight guests to register their plates. If the Camaro's driver registered, the police could have had a plate within days. If he did not, that tells you something too. On this record, nobody went and asked. A record that could have answered whose car that was, and how it got there, appears never to have been pulled.

What was hidden in Mo3's car for three years

Here is the strangest single fact of these three days. The analyst who processed Mo3's Honda the day of the killing found the money and the jewelry and no gun. He opened no panels. Five days later another detective went back with a warrant and took the driver's door panel off to dig out the bullets. Still no gun.

Almost three years later, on October 18, 2023, Detective Barnes, who is both a Dallas homicide detective and an ATF task force officer, brought in an ATF special agent and his explosives dog, Chewbarka, to search the Honda, which had sat in the impound lot the whole time. The dog went in through the passenger door and sat. The agents could not find what she meant. They put her back in and she went to the same place. Behind the carpet in the passenger footwell, toward the engine, was a loaded Glock 19 with a round in the chamber. Not something you could reach in a hurry, the agent agreed.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 9 Yella Beezy Trial ATF Agent Testifies His Dog Led Them to a Glock Hidden in Mo3's Honda / Pt 9

Nobody told the jury why anyone went looking for a gun in a murder victim's car three years later, or what it has to do with who paid for his killing. A loaded pistol hidden where the driver could not reach it does not suggest Mo3 was armed against his attacker. It may be the State getting in front of something. It may be the defense's investigation-gap theme handing itself to the jury. Either way, a car that was searched twice in November 2020 held a loaded gun nobody found. If the first two searches missed that, the jury is entitled to ask what else the 2020 investigation missed.

Two houses

Wednesday afternoon the State took the jury into two houses, and this is where the case gets crowded.

The first was 3915 Ramona Avenue, searched on December 8, 2020. A Dallas crime scene detective walked the jury through it room by room: a backpack of what he believed was marijuana, a Panther Arms semi-automatic rifle in a corner with a drum magazine that holds around fifty rounds, a second rifle against a kitchen cupboard with its own drum, a third rifle under the bed frame, ammunition, a ballistic vest, four phones, a video recorder in a closet, a machine for making credit cards, and a piece of mail in the name of Kewon White. Earlier that day the jury had seen White's own photographs from the day of his arrest, a rifle tattooed on his forearm and a rifle-shaped charm on his chain with the letters GRC.

On cross the defense told the jury what that house was. White was already in federal custody when it was searched. The warrant rested on Detective Barnes's affidavit, and Barnes was there in two roles, as a city homicide detective and as a federal ATF officer. The car outside was a green Camaro with fake money in the console. The license plates in the house were from Illinois. There were stacked boxes labeled as promethazine, a codeine syrup sold on Dallas streets, though the detective would not say what was inside them. A drug house, with a counterfeiting setup and a federal agent at the door.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 8 Two Detectives Testify to Rifles Under a Bed and Couch Cushions in the Yella Beezy Trial / Pt 8

The second house was 3030 Britton Avenue, searched November 19, 2020, eight days after the killing. A twenty-nine-year crime scene detective found a camera system with nine views of the outside, a video recorder in the hall closet, a Glock 19 on the floor by the couch, an AR-style rifle under the couch cushions, a pile of phones, marijuana and pills behind a locked gate in the kitchen, and a three-wheeled Slingshot in the garage. In a Manhattan Jewelers bag inside a Gucci bag in the bedroom closet, a receipt made out to "Chicago" with a 312 number, the Chicago area code. And tucked in the sleeve on the back of a pink phone, a Texas ID card in the name of Devin Maurice Brown Jr.

WATCH THE CLIP · LIVE FRI OCT 30, 4:15 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Detective Reads the Name Chicago Off a Jewelry Receipt Found in the Search

Then the defense took the house. It put up two of Brown's own Instagram photographs, already in evidence from Tuesday, and the detective agreed the couch looked like the same couch, the same floor tile, similar blinds. In his opinion, the detective said, it was a trap house: a place people hang out to gamble and sell drugs and sometimes sleep. The receipt was dated September 11, 2020, for a diamond bracelet, $6,500. That is one week before the birthday party and the chains video. And on the medallion in Brown's September 19 post, the detective read the letters G-R-C, or maybe C-R-C. The same letters were on the charm on Kewon White's chain.

WATCH THE CLIP Yella Beezy Trial Detective Tells the Defense the House Where He Found the Gun Was a Trap House

The State's redirect was careful in a way that tells you a lot. No chains found in that house. No stacks of cash. No crisp hundreds. The address on Brown's ID was in Duncanville, not Britton Avenue. Trap houses get a lot of people coming through. An hour after putting Devin Brown's ID in front of the jury, the State was working to keep the jury from deciding the house was simply Devin Brown's. That is the bind this case is in: the State needs Brown connected enough to be the man who located Mo3, and not so connected that he becomes a better candidate than Conway for the man who paid.

DAY 2 IN TWENTY MINUTES: TOP MOMENTS Yella Beezy Trial Day 2 Top Moments / Locked Eyes With the Gunman, $17,960, a Camaro on Camera

Forty-four casings, one gun, and it is not in the courtroom

Wednesday ended with the defense asking an ATF agent about the national ballistics database, the system that compares shell casings from shootings across the country. Had anyone ever compared the forty-four casings from I-35? He did not know.

Thursday opened with the answer, from the State's own firearms examiner at the Texas Department of Public Safety lab. He had test-fired every gun the jury saw on Wednesday: the three rifles from Ramona, the AR from under Brown's couch, the Glock from Britton. All forty-four casings from the freeway came from one gun. That gun is none of them. Every seized weapon was eliminated. The bullets were murkier: some ruled three of the guns out, and as to the Panther Arms rifle and the AR he could neither tie them in nor rule them out, because a jacketed bullet tears apart on impact and the marks may never survive. But the casings, the cleanest evidence of which gun fired, point away from all five. Is it common for submitted guns not to match? Absolutely, the examiner said, and that is a fair answer from a scientist.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 10 · LIVE SAT OCT 31, 6:15 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Firearms Examiner Says No Seized Gun Fired the 44 Casings Where Mo3 Died / Pt 10

On cross the defense only had to make sure the jury carried that out of the room. So these rifles and these Glocks have nothing to do with what happened on I-35? Based on the casings, yes. Whatever they belong to had nothing to do with this? Based on the casings, yes. Then the database again. The State's lab does not take part in it anymore. The forty-four casings had plenty of marks to compare against other shootings. Whether anyone ever ran them, and what came back, the jury has still not been told.

WATCH THE CLIP · LIVE SUN NOV 1, 10:30 AM CT Yella Beezy Trial Firearms Examiner Testifies 44 Casings at the Mo3 Scene Came From One Unknown Gun

Now ask the question that I think this trial owes its jury. On Wednesday afternoon the State carried in rifle after rifle and drum after drum, exhibit by exhibit, a courtroom turned into an armory. When it offered the second drum and the second rifle, the defense objected that they were irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial, and asked for a running objection to everything like them. The judge let them in. On Thursday morning the State's own expert set every one of those guns aside in four questions.

The rule here is simple to say. A judge can keep out evidence that is relevant if its real value to the case is substantially outweighed by the danger that it will prejudice the jury unfairly. The State's answer will be that the guns show access to the kind of weapon used and the means of the people around White, and that two of them were inconclusive on the bullets, not eliminated. That is an argument, and the State may win it. But an argument for access to weapons is a long way from what this jury watched on Wednesday, which was an arsenal, presented as if it might be the murder weapon, in a trial where no witness has tied any of it to the man accused. The defense preserved its objection. Whether it asks the judge to tell the jury what those guns can and cannot be used for is the thing to watch, and if it does not, I think it should.

Cameras, clocks and a backyard fire

The rest of Thursday morning belonged to the digital examiners, and the most important thing they said was about what they did not do.

An FBI computer forensics examiner, Scott Morris, deputy director of the North Texas Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, explained how his lab copies phones and video recorders without changing a byte, and how a hash value proves the copy is untouched. Then he told the jury that for the four phones from Ramona, the detectives asked only for the simple package, the whole contents dumped out for them to search themselves, rather than a full analysis. He would rather do the full analysis, he said, because that is how you tie a phone to the person using it. In this case nobody asked him to. He is not there to say who anyone is.

The Ramona recorder ran about fifty-nine minutes fast. Corrected, the State's flip book went like this. On November 10, the day before the killing, a man in a yellow and black jacket with what looked like a gun in his hand, getting into a black car with a temporary tag. On November 11, at about ten to one in the afternoon, roughly an hour after the shots on the freeway, the black car back at the house and a man in some of the same clothing walking in. At about seven past one, a man in the backyard with a grill or fire box. A minute later the same man with a white bottle with a red cap that the examiner agreed was consistent with lighter fluid. At about ten past one, a fire. Then the State put three stills from those cameras beside a photo already in evidence through the freeway eyewitness, and asked whether the clothing looked the same. It appears to be, the examiner said.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 11 · LIVE SAT OCT 31, 7:15 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Examiner Testifies House Cameras Caught a Backyard Fire the Day Mo3 Died / Pt 11

A fire lit with lighter fluid about seventy minutes after a shooting is the kind of evidence a jury reads as someone getting rid of something. It is evidence against whoever lit it, once someone identifies him, and so far no witness has. It reaches the shooter's side of this case. It does not reach Markies Conway.

WATCH THE CLIP Yella Beezy Trial FBI Examiner Testifies a DVR Caught a Backyard Fire the Day Mo3 Died

The defense's cross was about time and about who chose. The detective's request was for November 11. The whole recorder, more than a month of footage from eight cameras, was exported. But the lab did not start the work until October 1, 2021, almost eleven months after the killing, and finished on November 12, 2021. Which clips did the jury see? Ones selected by the district attorney's office or the police, the examiner assumed. He had met only with the lead prosecutor. He checked the disks the State made because, as he put it, he will not testify to something he did not create. That is an honest witness. It also means a month of footage from the alleged shooter's house was in police hands, and the jury has seen what the prosecution picked.

Then the other house. A retired director of the same FBI lab identified four phones from Britton Avenue and walked through the reports. Only one of the four, a rose-gold iPhone, was ever fully opened, and that took about six months of breaking its PIN by brute force. Again the lab was asked only to pull the data and hand it over. The jury did not see a page of what was inside any of them.

And then the moment that should bother everyone, whichever side you are on. A retired FBI examiner, Jackie Northrup, testified about the video recorder from Brown's house on Britton Avenue. Its clock was five months, three days, twenty-one hours and eleven minutes behind. Corrected, its footage covers November 16 through 19, 2020, the four days before police switched it off during the search. Nothing from November 10. Nothing from November 11. The detective had asked her lab for one specific window: November 11, from 11:56 in the morning to about twenty past twelve, the minutes of the killing. By the time police seized the recorder, eight days after the shooting, it had already written over them. Nobody deleted anything that she could see; the machine was full and overwrote itself, the way these machines do.

Eight days. The police knew within days that Brown's son had been on the phone with his father that morning; Jackson told detectives on the night of November 11 that she believed Devin had something to do with it, and on November 17 she signed consents for both phones. The cameras at the house of the man the State says located Mo3 recorded over the morning of the killing before anyone came for them. I am not saying anyone did that on purpose. The record does not show it and the examiner said she saw no deletion. I am saying it is a fact about this investigation, and it sits beside the lineup that was never shown, the visitor log that was never pulled, the gun that sat in Mo3's car for three years and the recorder that took eleven months to reach a lab.

A walk-in at the bail bond office

After a hearing with the jury out, which I come to below, the State called a bail bondsman. In November 2020 Kewon White was out on bond with her company, owing $2,550, behind on his payments and missing his check-ins. On November 11, 2020, he walked in, off schedule, and paid $300, which put him about two weeks ahead. The jury watched the office video of him counting it out.

The defense's cross was short and pointed. People bring cash into bond offices every day. White counted out low denominations, and on the screen you could see a five-dollar bill on top. The woman at the next desk in the same video counted out a much larger amount. Nothing about White's payment was unusual for a man on bond. And then the question the defense has asked of every witness in its own way: does Markies Conway's name appear anywhere in these records, as someone who vouched for White or guaranteed his bond? It does not, she said. None of these records has anything to do with him.

The State's point is easy to see. A man who had not been paying showed up on the day of the killing with cash. But three hundred dollars in small bills is about as far from a forty-thousand-dollar bank withdrawal nine days later as money gets, and nothing in that office ties either amount to the other.

The last witness we have a record of was a Fort Worth homicide detective who, in 2020, worked phone extractions on a DEA task force. Detective Barnes had asked him to extract six phones: two iPhones, a Samsung, and three labeled with a first name and numbered one to three. Every extraction went in. Two short selections from them went in for the record only, meaning the jury has not seen them. Whose phones those are, the jury has not been told. Then the lawyers asked to approach the bench, and that is where our record of the day ends.

The witness who would not talk

Now the hearing. Before calling its next witness on Thursday afternoon, the State told the judge it needed a hearing outside the jury's presence, and the jury was sent out. What happened in that courtroom is the most important thing that has happened in this trial, and the jury did not see it.

A man the State intended to call was put on the stand with his own lawyer beside him. The judge told him on the record that his lawyer had said he intended to invoke his Fifth Amendment right, his right not to give testimony that could incriminate him. Then the judge said something else: there was also the issue of his recantation, and the two sides disagreed about what effect that recantation would have on the State's case. That is what we are about to find out, the judge said.

The prosecutor then walked him, question by question, through what he had told a Dallas County grand jury on February 13, 2025, in 143 pages of testimony with Detective Barnes in the room. Did he recall testifying about the members of GRC? About the feud between Markies Conway, Trapboy Freddy and Melvin Noble? About a conversation he was present for between Conway and the friend the defense described in its opening, the one the State says carried the money? About identifying Kewon White as the man in the blue underwear at the Ramona house? About his whereabouts on November 10 and 11, and being in California with Conway until November 20? About White calling him while he was in California with Conway? About a conversation outside a barbershop, inside Conway's Denali?

To every question, the same answer. He would plead the Fifth. The judge pressed the State on what it actually wanted to do, other than ask questions he would not answer. The prosecutor asked whether he intended to invoke on everything he had said to the grand jury, and on every earlier statement he had made that was not under oath. He did. The defense asked him one question: had he given a recantation to Detective Barnes, with his lawyer present? He pleaded the Fifth to that too. He was not released. The judge told him he remains under oath and ordered him back at nine o'clock Friday morning with his lawyer.

Those questions are not evidence. They are what a prosecutor says a witness once said, and the jury never heard them. But look at what they describe. This is the first time in three days that anyone in that courtroom has described a witness putting Markies Conway with Kewon White, or with the money, or in a conversation about any of it. Every one of those questions goes straight at the three elements the jury has heard nothing on. And the man the State built them around will not repeat a word of it, and has, by the judge's own account on the record, recanted.

So here is the question I would be asking if I were in that jury box and knew what happened while I was out of the room. What happens to the grand jury testimony now? The Sixth Amendment gives every accused person the right to confront the witnesses against him, which means the right to have his lawyer cross-examine them in front of the jury. A grand jury room has no defense lawyer in it. Testimony given there, by a man who now will not answer questions, is exactly the kind of statement that right was written to keep out of a trial unless the accused gets his chance to test it. There are narrow exceptions, and the State has options I cannot rule out from here: it can try to get the testimony in some other way, it can try to remove his reason to stay silent, or it can go on without him. But if the State's case on the hire runs through a man who has recanted and will not testify, then the State is about to learn whether it has a case on the hire at all.

And there is a second question underneath it. The State knew about this recantation; the judge put it on the record, and the defense asked about one given to Detective Barnes with a lawyer present. A prosecution may call a witness it believes will tell the truth. What it may not do is treat a witness's silence as a way to put in front of the jury what the witness will no longer stand behind. Friday morning, when he comes back with his lawyer, is when we find out which of those this is.

Where the case stands after three days

Here is my honest scorecard, element by element, off the record as it stands tonight.

A murder: proved many times over, and not contested. Thirteen rifle wounds, forty-four casings, a surgeon with glass in his neck, a pursuit on foot across a stopped interstate. Melvin Noble was killed on purpose.

The shooter's side of the story: the State has built a real trail. A black Camaro at Jackson's complex overnight. Brown's calls to his son the evening before and the morning of. The Camaro forty seconds behind Mo3's Honda. White's mail in a house full of rifles. The man in the November 10 clothes back at that house an hour after the shooting, and a fire with lighter fluid twenty minutes later. White walking into a bond office with cash that same day. If this were White's trial, I would call that a strong circumstantial case. It was White's trial, in September, and he was convicted.

That Markies Conway employed the shooter: no evidence. That he paid or promised money for it: no evidence; the forty thousand dollars exists only in the lawyers' openings. That he intended the killing: no evidence. Motive, which is not an element, rests on one witness who now says the man Mo3 really disliked was somebody else.

My opinion, said as my opinion: if the State rested tonight, it would not have met its burden against Markies Conway. Not close. That is not a prediction about where this ends. The State has phones in evidence whose contents the jury has not seen, the lead detectives have not testified, and the State told the jury on the first morning it would hear Yella Beezy in his own words. The judge ruled before trial that some of the rappers' songs can be played, and the jury has not heard a bar of them yet. But a jury is entitled to judge a case on what it has been shown, and three days in it has been shown everything except the crime this man is charged with.

The defense, for its part, has spent three days doing something smart and something risky. Smart: it never fights the State on the murder or the shooter, so every minute the State spends proving the shooting is a minute that says nothing about Conway. Risky: it has built a whole second case against Devin Brown, and Brown is a co-defendant who will be tried after this. A jury can believe Brown located Mo3 and still believe someone paid him. The defense does not need the jury to convict Brown in its head. It needs the jury to see that the State's story has room in it for a payer who is not Markies Conway, and on this record there is plenty of room.

Friday starts at nine, and the man who has already said, with the jury out, that he will answer nothing is ordered back with his lawyer. Watch what the State asks for, what the judge allows, and whether the jury ever hears the word "recantation." Watch whether Detective Barnes testifies, and whether anyone asks him about the four names Mo3's mother gave the police, the lineup that never happened, the visitor log, the database, and the eight days before anyone went for Devin Brown's cameras. And watch for the money. The State promised it on the first morning. It has not shown the jury a dollar of it.

JUSTICE'S DAY 1 REFLECTION · LIVE SAT OCT 31, 5:00 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial: Day 1 Proves Mo3's Murder but Not One Dollar of the Alleged Hire DAY 2, EVERY MINUTE: NO BREAKS EDITION · LIVE THU OCT 29, 9:00 PM CT Yella Beezy Trial Day 2, No Breaks Edition: Surgeon, Crime Scene, Camaro

Every Case Story Part of this trial lives in one place, in order, and Day 3's full edition is on its way. If you want the whole trial the way the jury is hearing it, start with the Yella Beezy Trial Case Story playlist and go from Part 1.