Jury convicts Ohio woman in third trial for role in 2014 double gang-related homicide
It took three trials for prosecutors to convince a jury that Sophia Childs, the girlfriend of a high-ranking member of a local gang, helped orchestrate a July 2014 double homicide.
Juries in the first two trials could not reach a unanimous verdict. On Friday, it took a jury an hour and 50 minutes to find Childs guilty of two counts of murder.
Childs, now 41, was charged in the July 28, 2014, deaths of Robert Bass, 22, and Cherod Houchins, 21, at a home on Stevens Avenue in Franklinton.
She was dating Roshawn Agee, a high-ranking member of the Mound Over Berkeley Bloods street gang, according to testimony at her trial this week in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.
Childs had been running a "trap house" on Stevens Avenue that was competing with the drug house at a duplex down the street where the shooting took place.
Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Jason Manning played the jury recorded phone calls between Childs and Agee, who was in prison at the time of the shooting, where the two discussed a fight Childs had a few days prior with the doorman at the duplex.
On a call about an hour before the shootings, Agee said, "For every action, there's a reaction, you know what I mean?" They also had a conversation with an unidentified male that Childs on a three-way call about how doing a favor for Agee would put the man in Childs' good graces.
Less than an hour after the shooting, Childs told Agee on another recorded call that she wished he could watch the news.
Agee was convicted in 2018 of his role in helping to plan the homicides and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 27 years.
Prosecutors had charged Childs under a complicity theory of murder, arguing that even though Childs didn't pull the trigger, she was just as guilty as those who did. Manning told the jury Childs picked up and dropped off the shooters, which her cell phone location at the time of the shooting verified, and knew what was going to happen at the Stevens Avenue home.
Childs' attorney, Mark Hunt, told the jury that the witnesses in the case, who admitted to being drug addicts at the time, gave the jury "fuzzy" puzzle pieces to put together.
"Were these two people really discussing going to shoot a place up, or were they joking around about how powerful Roshawn was," Hunt said. "Those pieces do not fit together with fuzzy edges, that's reasonable doubt."
The shooters have never been charged in the case.
During Childs' trial, Manning said investigators had discussed Agee's brother as a possible suspect. Dionte Agee was shot and killed on July 31, 2014, two days after the double homicide. Agee was shot less than a mile from the Stevens Avenue duplex.
Childs will be sentenced at a later date.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio woman convicted at third trial for role in 2014 gang-related double homicide
