In January 2017, retired school teacher and Army Special Forces veteran Gerald Gillespie, 86, was stabbed to death in his apartment off Owen Drive in the Bordeaux area of Fayetteville.
On Tuesday, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the first degree murder conviction and life-without-parole sentence of Jameel Malik Davidson, now 28, for Gillespie’s slaying.
Davidson, who had been Gillespie’s downstairs neighbor in Briarwood Apartments, was convicted in April 2022 in Cumberland County Superior Court. (Briarwood Apartments is now called Channing Apartment Homes.)
Although the Court of Appeals upheld Davidson’s conviction, it left open a possibility for the conviction to be overturned later on the premise his trial attorney, Bernard Condlin, represented him ineffectively. Condlin could have requested a mistrial when a problem emerged with one of the jurors during jury deliberations, but never did, the ruling says.
Davidson was diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to court records, but he was found competent to stand trial in February 2021.
A jury deadlocked on his guilt or innocence in May 2021, then he was found guilty at his 2022 retrial.
Stabbed 25 times, found in a pool of blood
Gillespie was an Army Special Forces veteran with multiple tours to Vietnam, his daughter-in-law, Pamela Gillespie, told CityView in 2022. After retiring from the service as a master sergeant, he taught math and science at Harnett County middle schools, she said.
Pamela Gillespie discovered Gerald Gillespie’s body in a pool of blood in his apartment when she stopped to check on him because she and her husband hadn’t seen him that day, which was unusual, and he wasn’t answering his phone, a legal brief says.
He had been stabbed about 25 times, the brief says.
A few days later, another resident of the apartment complex told an investigator that on the day that Gillespie’s body was discovered, and while police were on the scene, Davidson told him that their neighbor had been stabbed to death.
This was before the police had publicly released Gillespie’s cause of death, the ruling says, so Davidson should not have known how Gillespie was killed. Davidson was also trying to buy a gun and preparing to leave town, the neighbor said.
The neighbor’s comment served as a basis for a search warrant of Davidson’s apartment. There, the police found his shoes, and they had Gillespie’s blood on them, according to DNA testing.
Davidson was arrested in Florida several days after the homicide.
Did his trial lawyer make severe mistakes?
On appeal, an appelate defense lawyer asked the judges to consider several points:
Instead of ruling on the third point, the Court of Appeals said the question should be whether trial defense lawyer Condlin fouled up by failing to ask for a mistrial when the problems began surfacing with that juror during jury deliberations.
Ammons met privately with the juror — but with a court reporter present at Condlin’s request to make a transcript — after being told that the juror wanted to be removed from the jury.
The ruling says the Constitution entitles defendants to be present whenever judges talk to jurors, but exceptions are sometimes allowed when the defendant agrees. Condlin agreed to the private meeting, the ruling says.
The Court of Appeals ruling says Condlin did not ask for a mistrial when the jury said it was deadlocked. He also did not ask to read the transcript of the private meeting or ask for a mistrial following the private meeting.
In light of this, Davidson can attempt to overturn his conviction by pursuing a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, the ruling says.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
This story was made possible by contributions to CityView News Fund, a 501c3 charitable organization committed to an informed democracy.
