Back to back murder trials for a Columbus County man could send him to death row.
Jury selection starts Monday as Chauncey Askew goes on trial for the first degree murder of Jerome Parrott in 2016. Court officials said that as soon as that trial is over, jury selection will begin for the capital murder for the killing of Trooper Kevin Conner in 2018.
The trials were moved to Brunswick County due to pretrial publicity.
Askew was 16 when he allegedly shot and killed Parrott in a pool room in the Green Acres community.
Askew, now 22, was 18 when he allegedly killed Conner during a traffic stop south of Whiteville. Askew and Raheem Cole Davis were in a stolen truck south of Whiteville near Sellerstown Road when Conner pulled them over for a traffic violation on Oct. 17, 2018. The trooper was shot as he approached the truck in the pre-dawn hours.
Davis had allegedly stolen the truck earlier that evening from a Chadbourn business. He was caught hours later when the truck became stuck on the railroad tracks in Fair Bluff. The murder charge against Davis was later reduced to being an accessory after the fact.
Askew was arrested Oct. 23, 2018, by U.S. marshals in South Carolina. Several months after his arraignment in the Conner case, Askew was charged with killing Parrott.
Parrott was also recently released from prison when Askew allegedly shot him in the Green Acres pool room. Prison and court records show Parrott had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, after he emptied a handgun into a vehicle and wounded two men. That shooting came several months after he was released from prison after being convicted of a 1998 shooting in Green Acres, where two other men were seriously injured.
Askew was arrested for a series of assaults and robberies in the Chadbourn area in October 2017. After being convicted of possession of a firearm by a felon and identity theft in 2017 in Cumberland County, Askew was convicted of felony breaking, entering and larceny in Columbus County. He was released from prison Aug. 31, 2018.
The state is seeking the death penalty in the conner case, but since Askew was a juvenile at the time of Parrott’s killing, the maximum sentence possible is life without parole.
The Parrott case is expected to last several weeks, while the conner murder trial could take months.
