The double-murder trial of Issiah Mekhi Ross resumed Tuesday morning in Orange County superior court after recessing early Friday morning due to a family emergency for his defense attorney. All North Carolina courts were closed for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday on Monday.
Ross, 21, black, male, formerly of Mebane, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of Devin Clark, 18, black, male of Mebane, and Lyric Woods, 14, white, female, of Efland, on the outskirts of Mebane in September 2022.
Their bodies were discovered on September 18, 2022 by two men riding a four-wheeler off a power line easement near the intersection of Buckhorn Road with Yarborough Road, based on testimony given on the opening day of the trial, last Wednesday.
Ross, then 17, was apprehended in Delaware on October 5, 2022 by the FBI Safe Streets Task Force.
He and Clark had attended Eastern Alamance High School; Woods, a freshman at Cedar Ridge High School in Hillsborough, had sneaked out of her house that Friday night to meet up with Clark, based on testimony given at the trial last week.
Defense attorney Jonathan Trapp of Raleigh has maintained that Ross had left the area because his mother had kicked him out of her apartment at Deerfield Trace in Mebane after discovering he’d taken her GMC Terrain without asking the night of September 16, 2022 and damaged it while getting gas at the Petro Travel Center.
On Wednesday afternoon, the prosecutor wrapped up her presentation of evidence, and Ross took the stand in his defense. By late afternoon Wednesday, he had outlined the chain of events leading up to the shootings and gave his account of his relationship with a tipster who identified him as the shooter (see related story, this edition).
Trapp had previously told visiting superior court judge Stephanie Reese, who is presiding over Ross’ trial in Orange County superior court, that the only witness he would potentially call is the defendant himself. Reese on Wednesday denied Trapp’s motion to dismiss the case, based on his contention that testimony given Tuesday by the tipster, Christian Sykes, wasn’t consistent with the evidence.
The prosecutor, Orange County assistant district attorney Anna Orr, called her last two witnesses to testify Wednesday morning: Evie Nguyen of the state crime lab, who analyzed a sexual assault kit for Woods and said that hairs tested had not been “microscopically consistent” with Ross.
Wendell Ivory, a DNA analyst from the state crime lab in Raleigh, testified Wednesday that swabs obtained from Woods’ underpants and genitalia showed that she and Clark were “contributors,” but excluded. A sperm test showed that Clark was part of the DNA profile but didn’t mean that sperm from Clark was present.
Video surveillance footage obtained from the Petro Travel Center at 500 Buckhorn Road – about 2 miles from the crime scene and introduced by Orr – showed the 2017 GMC Terrain being backed into a concrete pillar by someone with blond hair.
On Tuesday afternoon, jurors heard from Ross’ former friend, Christian Sykes, who testified that Ross had blond hair at the time (see separate story, this edition).
Sgt. Keith Goodwin of the Orange County sheriff’s office acknowledged under direct examination by Orr that, while Clark’s cell phone was never recovered, he was able to retrieve text messages between Clark and Woods through a search warrant to Snapchat, a social media messaging company that allows users to exchange texts, photos, and videos that disappear shortly afterward.
Jurors also heard sexually-explicit text messages between Clark and Ross in the hours leading up to the murders, which Orange County sheriff’s investigators obtained through search warrants to Snapchat and their cellphone providers.
Those messages were obtained through a forensic download into a software program that enabled investigators to see all of the Snapchat conversations between Clark and Woods moments before they were believed to have been murdered, around 2:00 a.m. on Saturday, September 17, Goodwin testified Tuesday morning. The messages then generated an “extraction report,” Orr summarized.
Snapchat messages: Clark offered sex to anyone who’d give him a ride to meet Woods
The digital forensic download showed that Woods had contacted Clark at 1:21 a.m. and 1:22 a.m. on Saturday, September 17, telling Clark where to pick her up and instructing him, “Park there, like on the side of the road…and cut the lights off when you get there till I get in the car,” Goodwin testified.
The “extraction report” for Clark’s phone revealed that, shortly after 11:00 p.m. on Friday, September 16, Clark was inquiring about a ride for some friends and about meeting up with Woods to “perform some type of sexual favors,” Goodwin testified. At 11:06 p.m. Clark texted another Snapchat user, “she’ll eat both us,” referring to “that [expletive] Lyric.”
Two minutes later, Clark texts, “Since she want to [expletive] me so bad, she’ll [expletive] whoever I’m with, too.”
The defense contends that Ross knew Clark but not Woods, and Clark instructed Ross where to drive after Ross agreed to give him a ride to meet up with Woods.
There was a gap in the messages between Clark and the other Snapchat user from 11:23 p.m. on Friday, September 16, until 1:05 a.m., Saturday, September 17, prosecutor Orr pointed out while questioning Goodwin.
The forensic download also showed that Clark had a group chat with 11 individuals at 12:46 a.m. on September 17, in which he asked, “Who own [sic] wheels and want free buns?” Goodwin testified, saying that message meant Clark was offering up sex to anyone who could give him a ride.
Jurors also heard Tuesday extensive details about what led investigators to identify Ross as the alleged shooter and how they tracked him down in Delaware.
Investigators later sent a search warrant to Ross’ cell phone provider, T-Mobile, to do a trace to get his “geolocation data actively every 15 minutes of the investigation,” Goodwin testified.
Luminol test revealed presence of blood inside GMC Terrain
During his investigation, Goodwin went to Deerfield Trace, where Ross’ mother had lived at the time of the murders, to inspect the damage to her vehicle.
On the front right tire above the tire, the sergeant noticed what appeared to be blood. Inside the vehicle, he observed brown stains on the driver’s side, on the passenger’s side “where the legs go down,” and on the console, Goodwin recalled from the witness stand Tuesday morning. He also observed a container of Armor All wipes “where the lid was still open,” the contents of a can of Pringles potato chips strewn around the vehicle, and a child’s booster seat turned upside down.
Luminol testing – a process in which a chemical is applied to an area believed to contain blood and glows bright blue when blood is present – was performed on the vehicle, Goodwin testified. “It lit up in a very bright manner,” he said, adding that there was a “very prominent handprint on the dome light inside the vehicle, which looked as if someone had tried to cover up the light, “as if not to be seen.”
Evidence showed that Clark’s pants had fallen below his waist, indicating that he’d been dragged, and dirt stains were visible on his shirt and sock, while gravel was observed around Clark’s midsection, Goodwin recalled on the witness stand. Several Orange County sheriff’s investigators, including Goodwin, have testified that the victims were found lying on their backs, with their arms spread out into a “T” formation.
A special agent in the FBI’s Charlotte office, Harrison Putman, an expert in cell site and location data analysis, testified Tuesday afternoon about the process he used to map out the location of the crime scene and to map out Ross’ movements afterwards using cell phone data. Call detail records and “timing advance records” were “married up” with a cell site list to generate a report, which among other things, tracks the movements of a person’s cell phone to determine a likely sequence of events.
Between 1:12 and 1:24 a.m. on September 17, Ross’ phone intersected with his residence. “At 1:19 a.m.,” Putman testified, “I can definitively say it’s moved east to the Mebane area; at 1:24, I can see it has moved toward the Devin Clark residence.” At 1:39, there were two “intersecting points” showing that both phones were near Woods’ residence, he told jurors Tuesday.
Putman’s analysis of call record details and 62 “timing advance records” indicated that Clark’s and Ross’ phones were “intersecting or overlapping with the crime scene,” with Clark’s phone “being stationary” at 2:42 a.m. on September 17 – the last time it connected to a network, the special agent testified.
Under cross-examination by the defense, Putman acknowledged there were several possible reasons Clark’s phone never connected to a cell network again: it could’ve been dropped into a metal boxes, run out of battery, or been put on airplane mode, he said.
The same process was used to track Ross’ movements up until he boarded a bus in Raleigh on Sunday, September 18, Putman told jurors.
Shell casings came from two manufacturers
Earlier Tuesday morning, Margaret Le Senechal, a forensics firearm examiner with the State Crime Lab at the N.C. Department of Justice, who outlined for jurors her process of examining 14 fired cartridge cases, two fired bullets, and several projectile fragments collected from the crime scene.
Her analysis of one item, a “jacket fragment,” was inconclusive, meaning that it couldn’t be identified as having come from the same 9mm handgun used to kill Clark and Woods; and two other items were “either fired by the same gun, or by a different firearm manufactured by the same tool in the same state of wear,” Le Senechal told jurors.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Trapp, Le Senechal said that shell casings she’d examined in December 2025 bore initials showing that they’d been manufactured by Remington, and two other casings bore “insignias” showing they’d been manufactured by Winchester.
“Although they were different brands, they were the same class [of ammunition], meaning they could be fired from the same gun?” Trapp asked Le Senechal, to which she responded affirmatively.
“Can you definitively say [they] were fired by the same firearm?” the defense attorney pressed the firearms forensic examiner.
“No, I can only say they were fired by the same or different firearm manufactured by the same tool in the same state of wear,” Le Senechal testified under cross-examination.
Investigators testified last week that no gun had been recovered, only 9mm shell casings found at the scene, which matched the caliber weapon owned by Clark’s father, Dexter Clark, Jr.
The defense maintains that Clark shot Woods during an argument that night, and Ross shot Clark in self-defense.
Jurors heard last Thursday from Dr. Lauren Scott, associate chief medical examiner, who autopsied Woods’ and Clark’s bodies, testifying that Woods had been shot seven times, and Clark had been shot six times. The medical examiner said most of the shots were from the back, indicating that the victims were moving away from the shooting.
Scott testified that “stippling” (gunpowder that leaves scrapes on the skin) on Woods’ neck indicated that she had been shot at close range. Woods’ toxicology report showed she’d had a blood alcohol content of 0.04 percent at the time of her death. There was no way to determine whether the blood alcohol content had been from drinking, or had been produced during decomposition, Scott testified.
The medical examiner said Clark’s toxicology report revealed he’d had a blood alcohol content of 0.08 percent, but she couldn’t say whether that had been from drinking or had been produced during decomposition.
A neighbor whose house on Yarborough Road is about 150 yards from where the victims’ bodies were discovered testified last Thursday that he’d heard four gunshots within a 10-minute span around 2:00 a.m. Saturday, September 17.
