A Gary man was sentenced Wednesday to a 105-year split term for killing his neighbor and wounding her fiancé after they returned to the Willows apartments.
A jury convicted Thomas Starks, 22, last month of murder, attempted murder, aggravated battery and burglary. He occasionally stayed with his mother, who lived upstairs from the couple.
The victim, Kajah Wilson, 27, was pronounced dead at the scene. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Deputy Prosecutor Veronica Gonzalez said Wednesday that Starks ambushed the couple. Lake County coroner’s office forensic pathologist Dr. Zhuo Wang determined Wilson had been shot seven times from above.
Defense lawyer Mike Woods noted that after Starks and his sister Leticia Starks broke into their apartment days before, Starks saw Wilson and her fiancé armed afterwards. After the burglary, Wilson confronted Starks’ mother and sister with a visible weapon.
Judge Natalie Bokota appeared to give Starks essentially a life sentence.
She sentenced Starks to 57 years for murder, 12 years on a gun enhancement and 30 years on attempted murder. On the last charge – for the earlier burglary – she gave him a six-year split term – with three years in prison, two in Lake County Community Corrections and one on probation.
LaTonya Carter, Wilson’s mother, held up photos of her daughter on the stand. She said Wilson would have turned 30 just before Halloween.
It’s a shame she had to sit and hold the photos, but couldn’t hold her daughter, she told the court.
“She deserved to be here,” Carter said. “She was my only daughter.”
In the beginning, she was “so angry at everybody.”
“I’m hurt,” she said. “Nobody deserved to be treated like a dog.”
She asked for a maximum sentence.
Richard Casson, Wilson’s fiancé, said he lived with the shooting every day. Court documents indicate he was shot in the hip, ankle, and two fingers.
“He took away the love of my life, the mother of my kids,” he said. “Not a day that goes by I’m not thinking about her.”
Casson asked for the “harshest sentence possible.”
Detective Roger Escutia testified he spotted a video on Instagram during the trial where a man who looked like Starks appeared to have smoked a marijuana cigarette in a vehicle in the courthouse parking lot. Deputy Prosecutor Jacob Brandewie argued it should be used as character evidence.
Woods questioned the authenticity and pressed Escutia on whether he knew if it was marijuana and noted it was an account with only five posts.
The defense called Starks’ mother, Mondai Myers, to testify – to illustrate his tough upbringing.
She said the family moved from Springfield, Illinois, to Northwest Indiana around 2011. By August 2012, the Indiana Department of Child Services removed the children from her home because the utilities were off and there wasn’t a lot of food in the home.
Myers won the children back by fall 2013, but lost them again in spring 2014.
She told Woods that Leticia called DCS because she wouldn’t let her bring boys in the home. When pressed for the real answer, she agreed when Woods said her daughter reported her using drugs and there wasn’t a lot of food in the home.
Thomas Starks spent from around age 10 or 11 to 18 in foster care in nearly a dozen different homes, until he “aged out,” Woods said. Later on, he said Leticia Starks, with two young children, participated in the burglary to “get something to sell to feed her children.”
In arguments, Gonzalez, the prosecutor, asked for 118 years.
In court filings, she asked for him not to be sentenced for aggravated battery, to avoid risking it being overturned on appeal for double jeopardy. She wrote he should get a stiffer sentencing for allegedly “lying in wait” for the couple to return to ambush them.
At one point in court, the judge accused him of targeting the couple because they could potentially put Starks in jail for the earlier burglary.
Woods argued for a minimal sentence – under the best circumstances still over a half-century – arguing that Starks shouldn’t have been convicted on attempted murder for Casson’s shooting because it wasn’t intentional. He argued Casson only saw a “shape of a person” firing at him, making it a “peripheral” shooting — i.e., he wasn’t being intentionally targeted.
He said Casson openly carried an “assault rifle” in the two weeks before the murder as a tactic to “instill fear.” Wilson confronted Myers and Leticia Starks after the burglary while carrying a gun with an extended clip.
The lawyer argued the shooting wasn’t an “ambush,” but a “chance encounter” with a “heavily armed couple.”
He asked for “some leniency” so Starks would have the chance to be “rehabilitated.”
Gonzalez retorted several points, saying Wilson was shot at a “downward” trajectory. Casson got some fingers blown off. Only his gun possibly prevented him from being shot in the chest and killed, she said.
Starks spoke briefly, apologizing to Wilson’s family but saying he was innocent. Police got the “wrong person.”
Gary Police were called Aug. 8, 2023, around 11 p.m. to the Willows apartments on the 300 block of Clark Road for a shots-fired call.
Casson told officers they were returning from Buffalo Wild Wings when a gunman ambushed them from above.
The man added he and Wilson both carried guns inside — an AR pistol and Glock 22, respectively — because they had been having problems with their upstairs neighbors.
Days earlier, Starks and his sister Leticia Starks, who was not charged in the shooting, were caught on camera burglarizing the victims’ apartment.
At trial, she declined to say her brother was the person with her stealing from the other apartment. She pleaded her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on cross-examination, before prosecutors later granted her immunity to finish her testimony.
A July 25, 2023, police report noted the victims’ door handle was broken as if the burglars forced their way inside. Items including an iPad, iPhone and Nike gym shoes were missing.
The apartment video appeared to show a man and woman with orange hair rummaging through the unit. The man had a face mask, Nike sweatshirt, and dark pants. He was holding a gun with a purple glove on with his left hand.
The building’s outside camera didn’t pick them up coming inside the building, leaving police to believe they lived there.
On the night of the shooting, the apartment building’s cameras captured the victims going inside, armed with two guns. Then, the female victim’s “silhouette” falls, hitting the front door’s glass.
The alleged shooter — also wearing a glove and holding the gun in his left hand — flees toward the back of the building.
No one appeared to come inside the building for at least two hours before the shooting.
Post-Tribune archives contributed.
mcolias@post-trib.com
