All Defendants Guilty In 2009 Marietta Double Homicide Case

MARIETTA, GA -- All five people charged in a 2009 double homicide are guilty and have been ordered to spend decades in prison. The case began late on Dec. 8, 2009 and into the early morning of Dec. 9, 2009, when the defendants, needing cash to retrieve a vehicle from impound, hatched a plan to rob people.

Two women, Rolaunda Bridget Fripp and Darchelle Renee Arnold, lured three men from a Marietta sportsbar back to the Las Colinas apartment complex on Franklin Road under the guise of partying. Once they got inside apartment 21-3, however, the three male defendants, wearing dark clothing and hoodies, lurched out from hiding and demanded cash and other items from the victims. A scuffle ensued, and two of the three men who had been lured there were shot, while the third man managed to escape and call 911.

Christopher O’Neal Jackson, 27, of Marietta, and Mark Anthony Jones, 28, of Mableton, were killed. Police traced evidence to certain residents of the complex and charged Joseph Eugene Brown, Desmond Omar Post and Jarvis Amartis Butts – as well as Fripp and Arnold – with multiple counts of murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault.

Arnold, now 30, pleaded guilty in May 2011 to felony murder and aggravated assault, and was sentenced to life in prison. Butts, now 30, was convicted after a jury trial of felony murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault in 2012, and his conviction was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Georgia in 2015. He was sentenced to two life sentences plus 20 years. The other three defendants were also convicted at trial in 2012 but were later granted new trials. A March 2018 attempt at a new trial for those defendants ended in a mistrial.

On Monday, as jury selection was set to begin for a third time, before Cobb Superior Court Judge A. Gregory Poole, two more defendants pleaded guilty. Post, now 36, and Fripp, now 30, each pleaded guilty to manslaughter, armed robbery and aggravated assault and were each sentenced to 40 years, with 30 years to serve in prison and the balance on probation. On Thursday, Brown, now 34, pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder and was given to two life sentences.

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