Their lives were taken three years ago.
Three years ago, Toya Wright’s family received the devastating news that Toya’s brothers, 24-year-old Ryan and 31-year-old Joshua Johnson, were shot and killed in New Orleans. On July 31, 2016, both men were found deceased while sitting in a car a short time after midnight while the vehicle was reportedly still running. An investigation into the double homicide led authorities to 34-year-old Antoine Edwards who was fingered by witnesses as the person seen running from the scene.
Edwards was subsequently arrested for the murders that prosecutors alleged was carried out after the brothers visited Edwards to buy marijuana. According to prosecutors, Edwards was upset with Ryan and Joshua because they used the front door his “trap house” where he also dealt other drugs, including cocaine. “Two lives are lost over a door and some weed,” Assistant District Attorney Ashley Spears said according to Nola.com. “This man got upset because these two men went to the front the trap house instead the back, and he shoots them.”
However, Edwards’s defense attorney Juan Fiol suggested that the case against his client was a witchhunt. “When Anita Johnson got there and found her boys, she started yelling out, ‘Toine did it’…That became the rule the case, that became the facts the case as to who committed this,” Foil stated. “That became the gossip, the gossip that was listened to by other people on the block.”
Toya, who is also the ex-wife to Lil Wayne, reportedly attended the three-day trial that occurred earlier this month. It took a jury two hours to find Edwards guilty second-degree murder and just yesterday, he was sentenced to life in prison.