James Foster III (4 of Clubs, Virginia)
2023-05-24 00:20:28
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is James Foster III. The four of clubs from Virginia. I'm sure you've already noticed, but we released two episodes today, two shorter ones. But despite the lack of information or length, we knew that these stories had to be told. It was a normal, warm Virginia day in April 2021 for a group of friends mingling outside a convenience store. When, out of the blue, they were shot up by someone driving by.
An 18-year-old James was killed over the past two years. Richmond Police have uncovered evidence they think points to the killer, but they're still waiting for the missing piece to prove it. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.
It was approaching 10.
30 p.
M.
And Detective James Higgins was at Richmond Police headquarters working the night shift when he got a call that there had been a drive-by shooting at a convenience store on the city's north side. One person, 18-year-old James Foster III, had been shot in the head and taken to a nearby hospital, where he was unconscious and barely clinging to life. Detective Higgins rushed to the convenience store, and by the time he got there, the only witness left was the store clerk. So he asked the clerk a few questions, but he didn't have much to say.
Pretty much they were inside and heard gunshots, and somebody came yelling, called 911, got somebody shot, you know. He was inside the store working at the time, so nothing he would have seen.
Detective Higgins asked if the store had surveillance cameras, and thankfully they did.
But around 22 18 hours on April 29, 2021, you see the vehicle of interest which committed this incident. That appears to be either a maroon Ford Explorer or Mercury Mountaineer. It comes down Hazlehurst Avenue and turns onto Hunt Avenue, it goes down, it goes off camera, you see the group outside, they're paying no attention to the street, they're talking to each other, hanging out. And this vehicle comes back up on Ladies Mile, and as it drives by. You can see in the video that you see muzzle flash coming from the vehicle and you see all of them start to scatter. You see James Foster go down immediately.
As everyone was scattering, one guy who was standing off to the side pulled out his gun and returned fire, as did another guy. The footage showed everyone both inside the store and outside, running for their lives, hopping in their cars, trying to get out of there as fast as they could. There were only two people who stayed behind with James as he lay there unconscious. And they also booked it out of there as soon as the first responders arrived.
Because it was dark outside, the camera didn't capture a great image of the vehicle or suspects. Like Detective Higgins said, it was clear that they were driving a large SUV like an explorer or a mountaineer. And he could tell that the person shooting at the crowd was in the front passenger seat, but that was about it. While Higgins was reviewing the footage, crime scene technicians were combing the scene for evidence. They found three different piles of shell casings, which, based on the footage, one set was from the drive-by shooter and the other two were from the guys that returned fire. Those casings were collected and would later be entered into the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, or NIBIN.
Since it was a drive-by shooting, the casings and footage were really the only things of evidentiary value that they could get from the scene. And as authorities were still processing that scene and everything at the convenience store, James father James, a foster, was receiving the worst news of his life.
Around 11.
30. My phone just kept going off and going off, and going off and going off and ringing. And at that particular time, it was one of his friends that was calling to inform me that he had been shot. When I answered the phone. He just bled out, he's been shot, and when he left here, he was breathing on his own. I jumped up.
I got dressed. I to this day do not know how I drove from my home to VCU Medical Center because all of that travel time in between. There is just a blur. I just don't remember it for all. I know somebody else could have driven me because I don't remember that part.
I got to the hospital, the hospital just so happened to be on lockdown when I got there, so I couldn't get in the hospital. I called inside and reached someone who connected me to a social worker. And they told me that they were going to come down and get me, and because they were going to come down and get me. I already had an awful feeling in terms of the outcome. Especially when his friend told me in preference that he was breathing on his own when he left. Which made me think there was at least some time period where he was not, and it was obvious.
The doctors basically told me that if nothing was done, and or if anything was done surgically, that my son basically would be a vegetable for the rest of his life. He would not be responsive at all. Of course, the whole situation was hysterical for everybody and we had to make the decision to use life support or to just let him rest peacefully.
James family ultimately made the gut-wrenching decision to choose the latter to let him rest peacefully, surrounded by those who loved him. James was pronounced dead at the hospital just hours after arriving, while all of this was happening, James family saying goodbye. Police processing the crime scene, Another detective was at the hospital, speaking with a different victim of the same shooting. It was a man who we'll call Billy, and he had been shot in the hip and come to the hospital after fleeing the scene. But Billy didn't have much to tell the detective, aside from the fact that he was one of the people who returned fire.
He claimed he didn't get a good look at the shooter and didn't know who it was. Now, whether that's true or not, authorities are a bit skeptical because Billy was a known gang associate and suspected gang member. So if he did see the guy, he maybe wouldn't have wanted to say anything. Once Billy was spoken to and the crime scene was cleared, law enforcement gathered back at headquarters to compare notes.
We began watching all the surveillance footage, trying to get the best picture of all 11 of these individuals that were outside.
Many of the people gathered outside the convenience store were familiar to police, so investigators could identify them almost immediately. For other individuals, though, detectives had to whip up persons of interest posters and send them out to other divisions within the police department and even authorities in a neighboring county. While those investigators were trying to track down those 11 witnesses, others were hunting down more surveillance footage from surrounding buildings in the area to figure out where the suspect vehicle came from and where it went after the shooting. And they got lucky.
Surveillance footage from Lincoln Mews apartments, which is less than a mile from the convenience store, had the answers they were looking for.
It went into the complex, left the complex, did the shooting and then went back to the complex and stayed for. I don't know, a certain amount of time. But they park out of camera view and they walk out of camera view so you can't see who it is.
Even though there wasn't a clear view of the suspect or suspects, the footage from the apartments did give detectives a better look at the SUV itself. Unfortunately, not a good enough look to see a license plate number, but enough for Higgins to notice something unique about the vehicle.
There were things about the vehicle that I knew that was a little bit different, or that made it kind of stand out to certain things.
Higgins wouldn't elaborate on what those certain things were, but that gave detectives a little bit more to go on, beyond looking for a maroon Ford explorer or Mercury mountaineer now? By the time investigators were looking at this footage, it was two days after the shooting, so the SUV was long gone from the complex. So what the detectives decided to do was to put together a vehicle of interest poster to pass out to patrol officers in the area. After that, Higgins got several calls from officers, saying that they saw an SUV that looked like the suspect's vehicle in the area. But every time, Higgins followed up, and none of them turned out to be the SUV he was looking for. Over the following days and weeks, and with the help of other divisions and departments, Detective Higgins managed to track down and talk with all of the witnesses there that night. But they didn't hold the answers he was hoping they would.
We had 11 people out there and none of them saw who shot, so we have no witness that can say that they saw the shooter. What they saw out there was pretty much everybody's story was we were standing out there, talking, hanging out, gunfire happened and we all left. Which, I mean, that's true, they're not lying when they say that, but.
But Higgins said most, if not all, of the witnesses had criminal histories, and again, several of them were known gang members and affiliates. So even though none of them were technically lying about what happened, he couldn't be sure that they were telling the entire truth either. And the fact that everyone present for the shooting lived high-risk lifestyles in one fashion or another further complicated the investigation in another way. Because with drive-by shootings, it's not uncommon for there to be quote-unquote collateral damage, someone who is not the intended target of the shooting, but who gets hit anyway.
Now, usually in those cases, investigators can look at who was present, figure out who the target really was and go from there. But in this case, though, it wasn't that easy.
No, they could have all been an intended target. You had three different gangs out there, I guess you could say any of them could have been a target. To be honest. Like, I told you, there was 11 people standing out there. You start firing wildly from the passenger side of the vehicle into the group, you're going to hit somebody more than likely.
The thing is, did he care who he hit in that group or was there somebody in specific he wanted to hit in the group? We don't know, we just know that that person shot into that group. And it just so happened that James Foster ended up being one of the individuals that was hit, and then you had the other fellow who was hit as well.
There was still a chance that James was the intended target, though. So Detective Higgins needed to learn more about him and figure out if there was someone who had a score to settle with him.
So I went through the phone and I even went into his social media accounts as well from his phone. I couldn't find really anything that stood out. As far as him having enemies or them, speaking of enemies, he seemed to have a lot of friends.
Going through his phone, though, did reveal some evidence that James himself was possibly caught up in some illegal activity. Detective Higgins wouldn't specify what that was, but he said it was nothing violent. Up to this point, it seemed like every Avenue investigators pursued was a total bust, but soon enough, police got their first promising tip. An anonymous informant provided some information, and then another informant came forward and gave police the same information.
Both of them said that word on the street was that a man who we'll call Joe Smith did the shooting. And the name they provided was a name police were already very familiar with.
Joe Smith does not have a very good reputation in Richmond City. He does robberies, he sells drugs, He's quite the guy.
Sure, these tips were just town gossip, but it made sense. Joe was known to be a bad dude, and Detective Higgins said that he was also known to frequent Lincoln Mews apartments. The place that the shooter's car was before and after the shooting. So, naturally, investigators wanted to talk with Joe, but when they tracked him down, he flat out refused to be interviewed. And without his cooperation, that lead kind of fizzled.
Over the following months, Detective Higgins kept quietly investigating, waiting for his next big break, and there were glimmers of hope. Around the end of May, he was notified of a hit in Nibin. The shell casings that the shooter left behind matched casings found at the scene of an aggravated assault in Washington, D.C. Then again, in September, there was another hit, another aggravated assault, again in D..C.
And then, yet again, in October, now six months removed from James murder, there was another hit from D.
C This time, it was a homicide. Detective Higgins stayed pretty tight-lipped about each case and didn't want to provide many details. But he said that he reached out to the detectives so they could put their heads together. But they didn't have any suspects, and all of the shootings seemed to be kind of random.
So not exactly the breakthrough Higgins was hoping for. Shortly after that October murder, there was another exciting development. D...C. police were executing a search warrant for an unrelated homicide case when they recovered the gun that fired all those bullets. And this was a huge deal because now they had the firearm in custody and that meant they could trace the serial number and figure out who had purchased it.
And want to guess who that was? It was none other than Joe Smith.
He'd purchased the gun about a year prior to the shooting that James was killed in. Obviously, at this point, major alarm bells started going off. For Detective Higgins. This was now the third time he'd heard Joe's name in relation to James case. And this time, it was more than just town gossip, it was pretty rock-hard evidence.
But Joe didn't want to be the only one to know about it. Unfortunately, to the prosecutor, not rock-hard enough to press charges. Because even though they could prove that the gun was his or that he had purchased it, they couldn't prove that he was the one who pulled the trigger. They say it could have been a street gun that got tossed around, maybe he'd given it to someone else that day.
The prosecutor wanted something more to feel good about charging Joe with the murder. So since the discovery of the gun in late 2021, Detective Higgins has been searching for that missing piece. He's tried to interview Joe again, and just like the previous time, he wouldn't talk. Higgins said that they've now turned to other methods, like working with the Feds, to get phone and cell tower records. And again, since this is a pretty fresh and active investigation. He wouldn't give too many details, but he implied that the information they're gathering is helpful for their case against Joe.
For this episode, our reporting team also talked with Joshua Boyles and want to hear the longest title ever. He is the Assistant Commonwealth's attorney with the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office for the City of Richmond. Try putting that on a business card anyway. He is assigned to James's case along with Detective Higgins.
And we asked him what else it would take to build a solid case against Joe without a confession.
It'd be nice if some of the folks that were out there started cooperating and letting us know a little bit more about what happened if they know. So, it's nice to know that Joe purchased this gun sometime before the murder. That's obviously great evidence, I'm hopeful that some of the phone evidence leads to some good results. Kind of pinpointing him. But at the end of the day, there's really no substitute for having a witness that was there and saw something.
It might well be true, and probably is true, that the folks that were out there that day didn't see the individual personally who shot them. But I hope that maybe if we find out what the motivation was for the shooting, then we can try to develop a better connection to the suspect.
In the meantime, James's father and the rest of the family are left holding on to the hope that someday soon, James's killer will be caught and brought to justice.
What I want to get across is, even though he was associated with some quote-unquote unfavorable situations, he still was a good person. He did not deserve to be 18 years old and lose his life, he did not deserve to be left in a parking lot with a gang of people running hysterically and not us being by his side. His mother and I were with him when he actually passed away. But the most thing that we want people to remember is that he was a good person. Genuinely. I have days where I struggle, especially if I'm talking to someone just in conversation and they ask me, Do you have children?
And I'm at a point where, you know, do I say yes, or do I say no, or do I say yes? I had children, I had a child, but now these circumstances have happened. So it kind of puts me and I'm still in a mixed place as to how to answer that question.
I miss him sticking his head in my bedroom, smiling, saying whatever, asking what we're going to eat, where we're going today, that kind of thing. Or just checking on me while I'm asleep. I miss going places with him. He was kind of outspoken, he spoke his mind, if there was something going on, he was definitely going to ask a question about it.
I miss that about him. And then, of course, just being with him and having him in our family, because the family circle has been broken tremendously without him being there.
If you know anything about the murder of James Foster III on April 29th of 2021, please call Crimestoppers at 804-780-1000.
You will remain anonymous. The deck will be off next week, but we will return the following week with a brand new episode.
The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast..com. So what do you think, Chuck, do you approve? I approve?
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