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There is currently a high profile case going on in Chattanooga TN. In this case it happened January 2015 when the suspect Cortez Sims busted into an apartment building in one of our projects and he began shooting. He shot 4 people one which was a one year old child. When police responded they found all four people inside and one of the victims did not survive. All of the victims were transported to the hospital for treatment. The one year old child was paralyzed and the other victims were later released. One of the victims Bianca Horton was fed up with all of the violence going on and decided that she was going to cooperate and began to tell the investigators that she knew the suspect and she would testify against him. The reason that people were scared of Cortez Sims is because he is a big time ranking gang member even though he was 17 at the time. Investigators were able to get enough evidence against Cortez Sims and took out arrest warrants. He was eventually arrested in Knoxville for the quadruple shootings and the murder of one of the victims. When he was arrested he was taken to juvenile. In the Chattanoogan: Juvenile Court Judge Rob Philyaw on Thursday morning ordered that 17-year-old Cortez Sims be tried as an adult in a College Hill Courts shooting that left one woman dead, a toddler paralyzed, and two others wounded. This was a victory for the prosecution. Police at the time knew that they had a very good case against Cortez Sims because not only did they have physical evidence of him at the crime scene they also had a witness that was going to testify against him. Two years later when the case was going to go to trial, the police responded to yet another shooting.Bianca Horton, 26, was found dead on the side of the road in the 2100 block of Elder Street on the side of Missionary shortly after 9 a.m. with multiple bullet casings on the ground beside her. The mother of four had been a witness in the case against the man accused of shooting her daughter (Chattanooga Times Free Press). This was not only a huge blow to the case but it also woke a lot of the people up to the violence that has been going on. The reason that we believe that she was killed was because she was going to testify against Cortez Sims. So how he found out that she was going to testify, and he gave his gang members a green light to have her taken out. As of to this date we have not be able to solve her murder, we have suspects but as of now we cannot prove that they did it. There are many twists that have played out in this case and it set to go to trial this year. The media has been really involved in this case and has been covering every aspect of the case. In this case I really don't think that the investigators or the prosecutors could have seen this coming with the murder of Bianca Horton. We knew that Cortez Sims was a high ranking gang member but were unaware that he had that much power. This case has opened the eyes of many people in the community and want to see justice done.

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On January 6, 2007 Tennessee's worse double homicide took place in Knoxville. Boyfriend and girlfriend Christopher Newsome and Shannon Christian were car-jacked, kidnapped, raped, tortured, then murdered in the most gruesome way. They were parked then car-jacked, held against their will, taken to a house on Chipman St in Knoxville, TN where LeMaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, and Vanessa Coleman, began raping Christopher Newsome with a foreign object, then dragged him by his ankles behind the railroad tracks where he was shot three time, once in the back of the head, neck, and back then was set on fire. Shannon Christian had to watch all this play out until she was gang raped, repeatedly raped by Davidson, Cobbins, Thomas, and Coleman, she was also sodomized several times and had bleach poured down her throat to destroy the DNA. She was hit over the head several times then placed in plastic bags then shoved into a trash bin only to suffocate to death. (Mikkelson, 2014)

This case turned very bad for the victims, who at this point were the parents of Newsome and Christian, the judge who presided over all of these trials (Richard Baumgartner) was later disbarred by the Tennessee Sate Supreme Court for buying drugs from a convicted felon under his supervision who he also had a affair with. All but two were retried and the parents were victimized yet again having to go through the whole ordeal again. This case was played out by the media, the retrials were moved to Davidson Co because of all the coverage, not only of the gruesome murders but that of the judge. (Mikkelson, 2014) There was a question of objectivity in this case, many questioned why it was not considered a hate crime. The one service that could have been done for the victims here was having only one trial and moving forward. (Mikkelson, 2014)

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