One of the 11 men who escaped from the Orleans Parish Prison on Friday is a convicted murderer.
In October 2024, a New Orleans jury found Derrick Groves guilty of the Mardi Gras 2018 shooting deaths of Jamar Robinson and Byron Jackson.
That shooting left three other people wounded. Groves shot and killed Robinson and Jackson with an assault-style rifle to shoot at a group of people outside a house on St. Claude Avenue near Andry Street. Prosecutors painted Groves as a drug dealer with a mean streak, telling jurors that he and his co-defendant, Kendall Barnes, who was also convicted, had been hired to kill a suspected gunman in another shooting.
An Orleans Parish jury initially convicted Groves in 2019, but the verdict was a split 10-2 ruling. He received a retrial after Louisiana’s unanimous jury verdict law took effect, leading to the 2024 verdict. According to our partners at NOLA.com, Groves was also connected to at least two other homicides in the Ninth Ward, one in 2017 and another in 2019.
Local and federal authorities who worked on the Groves case classified him as a brutal killer.
“The days of Derrick Groves bullying and brutalizing this community are over,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil said last October following Groves’s conviction. “The message in this case should be crystal clear to those who choose violence in this city: we will not stop until we do everything in our power to see that justice is served.”
Prior to the 2023 conviction, Groves was convicted on federal guns and drugs charges. In 2021, New Orleans-based federal Judge Greg Guidry sentenced Groves to nearly 12 years in prison for possession of heroin and fentanyl with intent to distribute and for illegal possession of a firearm.
So why wasn’t Groves in a federal prison? According to Loyola University law professor Dane Ciolino, the federal government, as a matter of comity, will allow a state to hold someone convicted and sentenced in the federal system if the state wishes to pursue felony cases against that person.
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