A Newport News man has been sentenced to life behind bars in the brutal slaying of his mother three years ago.
And he’s now charged with killing another man — a crime he had previously been charged with before he killed his mother.
Lance Moton-Stith, 29, pleaded guilty in July to first-degree murder and related counts in the April 2022 slaying of his mother, 53-year-old Yolanda Michelle Moton.
A state autopsy report said Moton had 12 stab and slashing wounds to her face and neck. Prosecutors said Moton-Stith used two screwdrivers and a “blade-like object” to kill her.
A gaping slash to Moton’s neck nearly decapitated her, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Rebecca Thompson said at a sentencing hearing last month.
Lance Moton-Stith, 29, was sentenced to life in prison in the 2022 killing of his mother. He now faces another murder charge from 2021.
“Her last moments were her son — who she loved — brutally attacking her,” Thompson told a judge, noting the defensive wounds on her hands.
Moton-Stith admitted to the crime in a letter to his sister shortly after his arrest, but told her he did it because his mother was going through a rough patch.
“If this was a mercy killing, it was the most unmerciful mercy killing I can imagine,” Circuit Court Judge Christopher Papile said in handing down the life sentence, terming the crime “absolutely horrific.”
It’s the second slaying Moton-Stith was charged with.
In July 2021, he was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the killing of 28-year-old Davante Rashae Daniels. Daniels was found dead in a car, shot multiple times, on Moyer Road on April 10, 2021.
But Newport News prosecutors dropped that charge about nine months later. And two months after he walked out of jail, Moton-Stith stabbed his mother to death.
Prosecutors, however, are now resurrecting the 2021 case: Last week, a Newport News grand jury indicted Moton-Stith on first-degree murder and gun charges in Daniels’ slaying.
The sentencing hearing last month centered on Yolonda Moton’s killing.
Family members weren’t hearing back from her on April 27, 2022, and asked police to go by the home to check on her, court documents said. Officers went to her house, on Wheeler Drive off Beechmont Road in Denbigh, at about 12:30 p.m.
No one answered the door, and the residence was otherwise secure, a search warrant affidavit said. Officers did not attempt to force entry at that time, which is protocol when there’s no clear evidence of an emergency.
But later that afternoon, Moton’s daughter, Brianna Bass, went to the residence with her husband, and they attempted to use their key to get inside. They were surprised to find the front deadbolt deployed, even as their mother rarely used it.
The couple then forced entry into the home.
That’s when they found Moton-Stith “standing in the living room with his hands up in the air,” a detective wrote in an affidavit. Bass rushed to her mother’s bedroom and found her on the floor in a pool of blood, partially covered by a sheet.
As his sister called 911, Moton-Stith walked out of the home. When detectives caught up with him later, he “said he did not know what happened” and claimed to have been asleep.
Police investigators gathered fingerprints from the scene, including on trash bags that had been used to partially wrap Moton. “The five latent prints each matched to prints belonging to Lance Moton-Stith,” the search warrant affidavit said.
The affidavit said Moton-Stith and his mother were the home’s only occupants, with a detective saying that a review of Ring camera footage showed no one else coming and going.
While in police custody, Moton-Stith dictated a letter addressed to his sister, with a detective writing the letter onto a sheet of paper. (The affidavit said the letter was written after Moton-Stith had been issued his Miranda rights).
“I’m sorry,” the letter began, apologizing for both “not saying sorry sooner and for the death of our mom.”
“Mom’s in a better place now,” the letter added. “I feel that she was lonely and stressed, with not having visitors and she couldn’t sleep at night. She started eating little. She worked to live. Now she doesn’t have to live alone because she is with God, and at peace.”
“I wish there was a better way to go about it,” he continued. “I should have talked to Mom about a better solution. I just want your forgiveness so you can be at peace.”
Later jail communications between Moton-Stith and his family also played a role in the prosecution. Three months after his mother’s death, for example, Bass was pressing him for answers.
“OK I did it,” Moton-Stith wrote on the jail communication system in July 2022. “I didn’t know she was in debt like that, I figured she was going through a lot of (expletive). U happy?”
“Why would u be happy though?” Bass wrote back. “Our mother was a huge part of my life whether you know it or believe it.”
At the sentencing hearing in late October, Thompson said the fact that Moton-Stith used three separate tools to kill his mother meant he had time to think of his actions each time he picked the next tool.
State sentencing guidelines called for a sentence of between 42 and 70 years in prison, but the prosecutor asked for a life term because of Moton-Stith’s “complete lack of remorse” and “the sheer brutality of this crime.”
Moton-Stith’s attorney, Christopher Voltin, said it was a “very gruesome crime,” but noted that his client accepted responsibility by pleading guilty. “Maybe it’s not ‘I apologize,’ but it’s a form of remorse,” Voltin said.
He noted that Moton-Stith was declared competent to stand trial, then not competent, then competent again. Whatever the case, Voltin said, “there’s some mental health issues going on there.”
Voltin asked for a sentence in years that could at some point allow Moton-Stith to get out of prison toward the end of his life.
But Papile rejected that idea, saying “the nature and circumstances of this horrific crime” warranted a life term.
A trial date has not yet been scheduled in the 2021 case.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
