A Clayton County jury convicted a man Friday of voluntary manslaughter rather than the more serious charge of malice murder in the 2011 beating death of his girlfriend’s mother.
When his trial began Monday, Latoris Grovner, 22, faced life in prison without the possibility of parole for brutally beating Alena Marble with a vodka bottle and a sauce pot in the early morning hours of June 3, 2011, then leaving her to die in the trunk of her own car.
The manslaughter conviction carries a 20-year maximum sentence with the possibility of parole, and nullifies four other convictions of felony murder – causing a person’s death by committing a felony – which each carried mandatory life sentences.
“So he’ll be back out on the street?” Marble’s brother Eugene Donaldson shouted as he and other family members stormed out of the Clayton County courthouse. “Thank you, very much.”
Jury members questioned by reporters after the trial refused to discuss the case.
Grovner was also found guilty of two counts of aggravated assault, three counts of aggravated battery and one count of tampering with evidence, each felonies that carry lesser sentences than the murder charges.
“We were obviously disappointed by the verdict,” said Clayton County Assistant District Attorney Kathryn Powers following the trial. “The evidence was clear not only that he beat Alena Marble, but the defendant’s own statements that he took to plan to get rid of Alena Marble. We believe that was nothing short of malice murder.”
Former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan weighed in on the verdict.
The “lesser included” offense of manslaughter, as prosecutors called it, was added to the possibility of the jurors’ verdicts by Grovner’s attorney.
Morgan said the felony murders were rendered moot because “you’ve got to have a felony that is separate from the actual death.”
The underlying felonies — the five felonies for which the potential life sentences could have been granted — all involved the beating incident.
Morgan said the jury likely paid attention to this.
“What they’re saying (is) it was a crime of passion,” he said.
Prosecutors told jurors that Marble stood in the way of Grovner’s relationship with her daughter, Kajul “Beauty” Harvey, then 21, after Grovner’s conviction for beating Harvey and cutting her with a knife in 2009.
Several witnesses, including Donaldson, testified that Marble spoke openly about fearing Grovner and Harvey.
The couple wanted Marble out of the way, prosecutors said, pointing to a police interview recorded days after Grovner was arrested in connection with Marble’s death.
In that interview, Grovner told police how Harvey – who lived with her mother – left the rear door to their townhome ajar so he could enter, and how he attacked Marble, before leaving her first on the sofa to try to use her ATM card to get money then rolling Marble in a blanket and putting her in the trunk of her car.
“Why didn’t you stop when you took time to get the bottle … to get the pot … to drag her to the car … to go to the bank?” Powers asked Grovner Thursday during closing arguments.
But during his opening statement Tuesday, Grovner’s attorney David White first planted the seeds for the possibility of a verdict of voluntary manslaughter, which is defined in Georgia as “causing the death of another human being under circumstances which would otherwise be murder and acting solely as the result of a sudden, violent, and irresistible passion resulting from serious provocation sufficient to excite such passion in a reasonable person.”
White told the jury his client didn’t expect to encounter Marble that morning when Harvey left the door open for him.
“That’s when it went down,” he said on Tuesday. “He was just as startled as she was.”
Harvey was pregnant with Grovner’s child at the time of the incident, and he admitted in the interview that he was still haunted by an earlier pregnancy he said she was forced to abort.
“She was pregnant before but her momma threatened her,” he said. “[Harvey] killed the baby. It would’ve been 2 years old and we would’ve been in our own house.”
In his closing argument, White suggested that Grovner’s parental instinct took over.
“Beauty is four months pregnant,” he said. “He wasn’t going to have a chance to be with this child.”
After the verdict was read, Clayton prosecutor Powers lamented that Grovner wouldn’t serve life in prison for Marble’s death.
“We believe that the evidence supported the full murder charge,” she said. “[Marble’s family] is obviously upset. They do not believe that justice was served.”
White, however, felt that Marble’s attempts to stymie her daughter’s relationship with his client fueled passions in Grovner that led to the tragic incident.
“At the end of the day, that mother talking to all those people saying she was afraid of her daughter and of Mr. Grovner was her way of saying she knew she was playing with fire,” White said. “Messing with the defendant’s child is never a good recipe.”
Harvey remains in the Clayton County jail on the same charges – murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, aggravated battery and evidence tampering – as Grovner faced, and will be tried at a later date.
Grovner will be sentenced at 3 p.m., on Jan. 28.
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