‘Say nothing to nobody.’ Witness reveals grim secret he says Gunn’s accused killer told
As the prosecution’s accusations against him have painstakingly mounted in recent days, Demarcus Little has gazed dead-ahead.
Hour after hour in court, he has sat stock-still, soldier-like, seated at attention.
“It’s almost like he’s in a trance,” one courtroom observer said.
Little, raised in Peach and Houston counties, was an Army sergeant based in Augusta until his arrest two years ago on charges that he murdered his girlfriend, Fort Valley State University student Anitra LaShay Gunn.
He has been on trial in Peach County Superior Court since last Monday. His stark demeanor and seeming absence of emotion — a silence that is every bit his right — has nonetheless stood out.
Whether he will testify is unclear. Save for his attorney and his family, Little, 24, has made almost no eye contact with anyone else during 30-plus hours of open court. He has instead donned something of a thousand-yard stare, his eyes apparently fixed on a space to the judge’s left, averted from the jury, as witness upon witness has sat and sworn to speak the truth.
Dressed in dark, pinstripe suits, the 5-foot-4, 150-odd-pound Little has seemed unfazed by the goings on, which on Friday, the fourth day of testimony, were as dramatic and wrenching as any thus far.
A young man who had been one of Little’s closest friends, Jaivon Abron, took the stand and for nearly three hours laid out his version of how he came to realize Little had — according to him and to investigators — killed the 22-year-old Gunn.
Abron, 23, who graduated from Warner Robins High School a year after Little but was still close to him, knew Gunn through Little, who had dated her off and on in what the authorities have described as a “toxic” relationship.
Gunn, from Atlanta, was a senior majoring in agriculture. She worked as a server at a popular Fort Valley restaurant. News of her disappearance on Valentine’s Day 2020 led television newscasts and made headlines across the region. Her body was found four days later, hidden in a brush-and-limb pile in some woods about four miles north of the university campus. She’d been strangled.
For the better part of four days, no one seemed to know what had become of her.
But in court on Friday, Abron testified that he learned of Gunn’s fate about 48 hours after she vanished.
Abron said that he and Little had attended a Fort Valley party the night of Feb. 13, 2020, and that they’d left the party with Gunn. Early that Feb. 14, Abron said as best he knew, Gunn and Little had retired to another bedroom not far from where Abron was sleeping at Little’s aunt’s house north of town.
Late in the day on Valentine’s, however, concerns arose about Gunn’s whereabouts. Her friends and loved ones couldn’t reach her.
Abron said he didn’t think much of it until the next day, Feb. 15, a Saturday, when Gunn’s car, a white 2013 Chevy Cruze, turned up in a neighborhood where Little had asked Abron to pick him up the day before.
Abron said he had wondered and even asked if a white car he saw near the spot he picked up Abron belonged to Gunn. Abron said Little told him it was not Gunn’s car.
But on Feb. 15 when the car, which in fact was Gunn’s, turned up there, the police showed up to examine it. Abron accompanied Little to the scene.
“I was shocked,” Abron said, “because it’s the same place ... I picked him up. So now it’s like a whole bunch of stuff running through my head. ... Like, ‘What in the hell’s going on?’ ... My mind’s racing. .. Now I’m getting scared.”
Abron’s suspicion, however, did not prompt him to tell anyone, which he admitted in court Friday. He was later charged with concealing Gunn’s death and making false statements to investigators about what had happened to Gunn. He was not granted immunity on those charges in exchange for his testimony against Little, who has been jailed on murder charges since Feb. 21, 2020.
As Abron went on, revealing more and more, Little, with a black surgical mask covering his nose, mouth and chin as it has throughout the trial, sat motionless 20 feet away, his vacant stare intact.
Abron said he hadn’t known until two days after Gunn disappeared that Little had, as prosecutors allege, killed Gunn sometime on the morning of Valentine’s Day and then driven her body off-road into the woods in the trunk of her car, tossed the body, partially covered it with limbs and straw and ditched her damaged car back in town.
Abron testified that he didn’t know his friend had killed Gunn until he and Little were driving north of Fort Valley near Little’s aunt’s place on the afternoon of Feb. 16, 2020, when Little told him he had choked Gunn to death.
The exchange, Abron said, was harrowing.
They were out in the countryside, pulling into a pine thicket off Greer Road.
Abron knew Little had a gun in the car.
What Abron said he feared, but didn’t yet know, was that they had arrived at the place where Gunn’s body was dumped.
Abron said Little told him, “If I tell you this, bruh, you can’t say nothing to nobody. And if you do, you know what’s up.”
Was that a threat, prosecutor Dawn Baskin asked Abron on the witness stand.
Yes, it was, Abron said, but he said he told Little to “chill,” that it was OK, that Little should tell him what was bothering him.
Abron said Little then fessed up to what happened between him and Gunn during the night they’d all spent at Little’s aunt’s house on Chestnut Hill Road.
“Man,” Abron said Little told him, “I was talking to ‘Nitra, bruh, and I was pouring my heart out to her ... trying to tell her how I feel about her and, you know, how much I love her and stuff.”
Abron said Little “was like, ‘Um, she ended up laughing in my face.’ ... He was like, ‘Bron, I don’t know what happened, I just blacked out and I hit her.’ Then it was like ... he just grabbed her and just started choking her.”
Abron said Little told him that at first Gunn fought back, but she then stopped.
Little, he said, mentioned that it was as if Gunn then gave up, lifeless, that it “felt like she had wanted to go with her mom,” referring to Gunn’s late mother.
Abron said that when he heard that he was “shocked, like damn,” stunned that Little, his buddy, had now dragged him into a murder case.
“You kept me in the blind,” Abron said of his thoughts toward Little that day, wondering why Little, “like a idiot,” had involved him.
Now, Abron said, here they were, deep in the woods not far from Gunn’s body.
Abron said he didn’t look where the body was. He said Little confided in him that he had dragged Gunn to the trunk of her car and tossed her in the woods more than 150 yards from the nearest road.
There was a reason, Abron testified, that Little had led him to the dump site. Little, he said, needed to retrieve the front bumper of Gunn’s car, which had fallen off when Little allegedly drove it into the forest, barreling through limbs and brush. Prosecutors have suggested that leaving it there, if later found, might help investigators link the body to the car.
Abron said that as they rode, Little stopped his car, a Toyota Corolla, deep in the woods and stepped out. Little, he said, soon put a hand over his nose.
“That’s when I really got shook,” Abron said. “I was like, ‘You got me back here at this spot with that body.’”
Abron said it was out of fear that he helped Little load the car bumper into the back seat of Little’s car before they drove it to another spot and tossed it into a roadside ditch.
At the end of more than two and a half hours of testimony, prosecutor Baskin asked Abron how he felt now, sitting there testifying against a once-close friend who had been like an older brother to Abron.
“It shouldn’t have even got to this point,” Abron said.
He said Little should have owned up to his alleged crime.
“Just be a man. ... If you did your dirt,” Abron said, “you do your dirt. ... Why not just stand up and take yo (expletive).”
The prosecutor then asked Abron if he killed Gunn.
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you help kill Anitra Gunn?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you help dispose of Anitra Gunn’s body?”
“No, ma’am.”
Minutes later, Little sat still as his former friend walked out of court.
Testimony in the trial was set to resume Saturday with closing arguments possibly on Tuesday.
This story was originally published March 14, 2022 at 5:00 AM.