NEW BOSTON, Texas-A Bowie County jury convicted a Texarkana man of murder Thursday for shooting a man to death earlier this year at a gas station.
After returning a guilty verdict Thursday afternoon, the jury of 10 men and two women was instructed by 102nd District Judge Bobby Lockhart to return to the Bowie County Courthouse Friday afternoon to decide the punishment Tyvon Montrel Gullatt, 23, should receive for the Feb. 10 murder of Carlos Clark. Clark, 25, was shot in the back as he sat in the front passenger seat of a Nissan Sentra parked at the Chevron on State Line Avenue in Texarkana, Texas.
Assistant District Attorneys Kelley Crisp and Lauren Richards argued that Gullatt noticed Clark was carrying a large sum of cash when he watched him playing dice at the Sugar Shack nightclub hours before the shooting. Crisp told the jury that Gullatt and a juvenile drove to the gas station so that Gullatt could rob Clark.
Clark was sitting in the Sentra's front passenger seat when Gullatt climbed in the back, pulled out a pistol and put it to his back. The damage to Clark's body was described by expert witnesses as a "contact wound" that left a print of the gun's muzzle on Clark's back with a bullet exiting through the front upper part of Clark's body. Clark and the Sentra's driver fled from the car after the shooting. Clark did not survive.
Not long after the shooting 911 dispatchers received a call from Gullatt, which was played for the jury Thursday. On the call, Gullatt claims that he was waved over to the Sentra and that its occupants tried to rob him and "take everything I had." Gullatt told the operator that one of the men in the car had the 9 mm pistol that shot Clark and that he was not the one who fired it.
But when police arrived at the home on Main Street in Texarkana, Texas, where Gullatt lived with his grandparents, they found a 9 mm pistol that turned out to be the murder weapon, according to firearms experts. An expert witness from the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab testified that the gun did not malfunction, that it was outfitted with two safety mechanisms and that more than six pounds of pressure was required for the trigger mechanism to release a bullet.
Gullatt's defense lawyer, Jasmine Crockett of Dallas, argued that the shooting was a drug deal gone wrong. Crockett also asked the jury to focus on the crime with which Gullatt is currently charged, not on testimony regarding a home invasion robbery Gullatt allegedly committed in 2014. Crisp told the jury that the reason Gullatt was not convicted in that case is because Gullatt's family offered the victim money afterward to alter his version of the alleged crime.
The jury is expected to hear additional testimony Friday morning concerning the punishment Gullatt should receive. He faces five to 99 years or life in prison.