TEXARKANA, Texas - A teen who brought a stolen firearm to a local high school after threatening a former girlfriend and her mother was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison.
Ladarious Kashone Cardwell Forte, 18, pleaded guilty to robbery and to unlawfully carrying a weapon on a school campus at a hearing before 102nd District Judge Jeff Addison. Forte received 20 years on the robbery charge and 10 on the weapons offense but will serve the two terms concurrently.
Cardwell-Forte was not sentenced on a charge of theft of a firearm though that count may be considered by parole officials, Assistant District Attorney Randle Smolarz said.
Cardwell-Forte was 17 when he was arrested March 19 moments after walking into Liberty-Eylau High School with a stolen firearm, according to a probable cause affidavit. The night before Cardwell-Forte pointed a gun at a former girlfriend and her mother in the doorway of their apartment.
"The victims will have to live with these violent memories for the rest of their lives," Smolarz said. "We appreciate all the law enforcement officers for all their hard work to make sure that nothing else happened."
Cardwell-Forte went to a unit of the Lakeridge Apartments in Wake Village, Texas, where the 14-year-old girl lived with her mother at about 8:30 p.m. March 18. The girl's mother told police that Cardwell-Forte was "yelling and cursing" when she answered a knock at the door.
The mother reported that the girl and Cardwell-Forte had been boyfriend and girlfriend for about six weeks when their relationship ended and her daughter started "talking" to a different young man. Cardwell-Forte demanded that his former girlfriend call the second young man while he stood at her apartment.
Cardwell-Forte, draped in a blanket, threw the phone to the ground after speaking to his rival. Two young women with Cardwell-Forte were trying to calm him when he pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the mother and her daughter through the apartment door.
The mother reported that she slammed the door, locked it, ushered her children into a back room and extinguished the lights. When Wake Village police arrived, the mother showed them text messages sent March 16 in which Cardwell-Forte threatened to kill the girl and her new boyfriend at school.
Liberty-Eylau Independent School District Chief of Police Bart Veal, who was coordinating with local police, documented text messages from Cardwell-Forte to the girl stating he would "blow her head off at school because he really doesn't care." Officers searched for Cardwell-Forte that night but were unable to locate him.
Early the following morning, officers gathered at Liberty-Eylau High School in search of Cardwell-Forte. The officers noticed a student arriving late who had just signed in at the front office and stopped him in a hallway as he headed toward classrooms. In the waistband of Cardwell-Forte's pants, officers found a 9 mm handgun which had been reported stolen in Texarkana, Texas.