NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Three gunmen from one of New Orleans' most violent street gangs will spend the rest of their lives in federal prison for a double murder committed outside a high school basketball game nearly a decade ago. Terran Williams, known as "Funky," Tyrone Bovia, known as "Sixx," and Javonta Doleman, known as "Dutt," all of New Orleans, were sentenced to life imprisonment by U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo, U.S. Attorney David I. Courcelle of the Eastern District of Louisiana announced on October 30. A jury had convicted all three in April 2025, after a multi-week trial, of RICO conspiracy, drug trafficking conspiracy, firearms conspiracy and violent crime in aid of racketeering (VCAR) murder.
Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Louisiana (DOJ), Oct 30 2026
All three were members of the Byrd Gang, also known as M3, MagFischer, 315 and Piff Gang, which operated primarily out of the former Magnolia Housing Development and also had ties to the Westbank, prosecutors said. Its members distributed heroin, fentanyl, crack cocaine and marijuana daily, and always possessed firearms. Williams, Bovia and Doleman, the Justice Department said, participated in numerous drug trafficking activities and violent crimes and acted as gunmen for the gang.
The night of January 31, 2017
The murders at the centre of the case happened on January 31, 2017, outside Edna Karr High School. According to the evidence at trial, a Byrd Gang member attending the basketball game recognised a member of the rival Ghost Gang — also called the Goonie Gang — inside the auditorium and alerted Williams. Williams, Bovia and Doleman, with other gang members and associates, drove across the river to the school to kill their rival. When the rival and an associate of his left the game and sat in a car in front of the school, the three defendants approached the car carrying two rifles and a handgun and opened fire. The rival attempted to return fire with a nine-millimetre handgun but was killed at the scene; his associate, also shot, later died in hospital. Awaaz Punjab does not name the two men killed, in line with its policy on victims in school-adjacent cases.
The Edna Karr murders were not the gang's only violence. Bovia was also convicted for his role in a second shooting in May 2017 at the Bernmas Apartments, where another Ghost Gang member lived and was the intended target; Bovia's companion, fellow Byrd Gang member Terrence Augustine, was shot and killed by return fire during that incident, and gang member James Alexander has pleaded guilty to that shooting. Evidence at trial showed a slew of back-and-forth retaliatory shootings between the Byrd Gang and the Ghost Gang, much of it fuelled by social media posts, rap music and videos — a cycle in which, prosecutors said, numerous people from both gangs were shot and killed and many innocent bystanders were also shot. During the investigation, officers recovered dozens of firearms, most with large-capacity magazines, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition from Byrd Gang members, including from the three defendants.
What is solid
- Williams, Bovia and Doleman were convicted by a jury in April 2025 of RICO conspiracy, drug trafficking conspiracy, firearms conspiracy and VCAR murder, and have now been sentenced by Judge Jane Triche Milazzo to life imprisonment, per the U.S. Attorney's Office.
- The life terms for the murders (Counts 4 and 6) were mandatory; the court added life for RICO conspiracy (Count 1), 240 months on each of Counts 2 and 3, and a consecutive 120 months for Bovia on Count 9.
- The case was investigated by the FBI, including its New Orleans Gang Task Force, with the New Orleans Police Department, Sulphur Police Department, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, Louisiana State Police and Jackson County Sheriff's Office, and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Elizabeth Privitera, David Haller and Sarah Dawkins.
What is only claimed
- The account of the January 2017 shooting — including the tip from inside the game and the drive across the river — is the prosecution's case as proven to the jury's satisfaction at trial; the defendants were convicted, and any further challenge would come through the appeals process.
- Characterisations of the wider gang war, including how many bystanders were shot, are the Justice Department's summary of the trial evidence, not a separate independent count.
"The sentences of life imprisonment for Williams, Bovia and Doleman ensures that these violent murderers and drug traffickers will spend the rest of their lives in federal prison," said U.S. Attorney Courcelle. "These prosecutions and sentences are examples of the federal government's dedication to bring individuals who wreak havoc on our community to justice." The Justice Department said the case was brought under Project Safe Neighborhoods, its nationwide violent-crime programme, as part of Operation Take Back America.
Why a 2017 street murder became a federal life case
The legal vehicle matters. By charging the killings as violent crimes in aid of racketeering — murders committed to advance a criminal enterprise — federal prosecutors could put the gang itself on trial: its drug distribution, its guns and its retaliation cycle, not just a single night's shooting. That is also why the sentences stack the way they do: mandatory life for the VCAR murders, life again for the RICO conspiracy that bound the enterprise together, 20-year terms for the drug and firearms conspiracies, and, for Bovia alone, a further 10 years served consecutively for discharging a firearm. In the federal system there is no parole, so a life sentence means exactly what it says.
All three men begin life sentences in the federal prison system, with no parole. Their convictions were returned in April 2025 and the sentences imposed by Judge Milazzo close the trial-court phase of a case that began with a high school basketball game in January 2017; any challenge now would be by appeal to the federal appeals court, the route available to every federal defendant.
For New Orleans, the case closes one of the ugliest chapters of its late-2010s gang wars — a feud amplified by social media and music videos that, on the prosecution's evidence, kept producing funerals on both sides and wounded people who had nothing to do with either gang. The three men who fired outside Edna Karr High School will not be part of that cycle again.