NEWPORT NEWS — Brendon Devon White was charged in Newport News about five years ago with strangling the woman who lived with him.
According to court filings at the time, he refused to abide by the emergency protective that the woman — the mother of his then 3-year-old son — took out against him. He instead grabbed her phone, put both hands around her neck until she couldn’t breathe, and threatened to kill her at gunpoint, the complaint said.
“I was planning on killing you all day anyway,” White told her, according to the November 2018 complaint. “Write your own suicide note and make it easier on me.”
White was charged with six counts that day, and faced up to 19 years in prison if convicted. But the case never made it to trial — and White walked free in early 2021 — because the woman didn’t show up for several court hearings.
Now White stands accused of strangling a different woman — to death — in Northern Virginia.
Tatyana Zakiyyah Cooks’ relatives called police at about 8 p.m. last Thursday, concerned that the 30-year-old had failed to pick up her 1-year-old son from his day care in Prince William County. Her car was missing from her Woodbridge apartment, even as her purse and cellphone were still there.
Police entered Cooks as a missing person into state and national databases, Prince William County Police Lieut. Jonathan Perok said.
The databases soon “pinged” on a car driving early Friday morning in Newport News — which has various license plate readers deployed around the city. Newport News Police stopped the car and determined White was at the wheel, Perok said.
Cooks’ family members then told investigators in Prince William County that White — the father of Cooks’ baby who lived with her and dated her “on and off” for seven years — wasn’t supposed to be using her car.
On Friday morning, Perok said, Prince William detectives and Cooks’ relatives were meeting at her apartment when a garbage truck came down the street to pick up the week’s trash. Detectives decided to stop the truck to search it — and later found Cooks’ body amidst the garbage.
Newport News Police arrested the 28-year-old White “without incident” at about 4:30 p.m. Saturday at an apartment complex off Warwick Boulevard in Denbigh. After five days at the Newport News City Jail, he was transferred Thursday to the Manassas Regional Adult Detention Center on a second-degree murder charge.
Following an autopsy, the State Medical Examiner’s Office told the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot this week that Cooks died by “asphyxia due to neck compression.” Detectives have told the family that Cooks was strangled to death.
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2018 victim has regrets
In light of the recent turn of events in Northern Virginia, the woman in the 2018 Newport News case now says she “absolutely” regrets that she didn’t cooperate in her own case against White.
“I wish I would have gone to court and testified,” Annika Arrington said in an interview with the Daily Press this week. “I do wish I would have put him in jail at the time that he was definitely supposed to go.”
Arrington, now 26, said that she was going through a lot at the time — including an abusive relationship with another man.
“I did like maybe one court hearing,” Arrington said. “After the first one, I just felt uncomfortable. And then as I was trying to make it to the rest of them, I was going through other things. I was actually in a different domestic violence situation. Every time I tried to go, it just wasn’t working.”
Several times, she explained, she got dressed up and ready for court and the new boyfriend would pick arguments.
“Like one particular time, he thought I was too dressed up,” Arrington said. “He thought I was ‘getting dressed up for my son’s father’ is how he put it.”
But as time went on, Arrington began to think things would be OK even if White wasn’t convicted on the charges, given that the child transfers between the former couple were quick and easy.
“After a while, I was just like, as long as he’s not around me, I could be fine,” she explained. When White would come by to get their son, Arrington said, she would “open the door, he gets his son and I closed the door … I didn’t see his face or anything.”
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Challenging cases
Newport News’ top prosecutor, Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn, said that once things calm down in an abusive relationship, the victim often falsely begins to think the problem is in the past.
“A lot of times (the victim) says, ‘Well, I’m not gonna deal with him anymore, so he’s not gonna be a problem anymore,'” Gwynn said. “Well, what he’s gonna do is find somebody just like her and continue the abuse for somebody else. So it’s not going to end unless we end it.”
Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell — the president of the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys — said domestic violence cases across the country tend to be difficult because victims often “fight us in helping them.”
“It’s a national issue, to convince victims of domestic abuse to go for a completion of a prosecution,” he said. “We find ourselves trying to convince them that allowing the system to help them navigate through this very tough situation is going to be in their best interest. And that is not an easy job to execute.”
“You’re dealing with the emotions of the victim, who many times still has an allegiance to their abuser,” Bell said. “There are often very challenging economic factors where the abuser may be the breadwinner.”
Sometimes “they don’t want to see their kids’ parent get convicted,” he said. “And then there’s the emotional factor, where they may still love the person.”
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‘I turned my head and closed my eyes’
Arrington — now a welder at Newport News Shipbuilding and a member of the Virginia Army National Guard — said she began dating White in 2013 when they attended Hampton High School. She had a child with him two years later.
They later lived together in a Newport News apartment, and continued to do so even after they had split up. “We both agreed that it was best that we just live together and make that work so he can see his son more,” Arrington said.
But on Nov. 24, 2018, White got mad when Arrington took their toddler son to play with her male friend’s daughter, Arrington said in court documents.
She said White choked her, slammed her into a wall and “threatened to shoot up my house,” telling their 3-year-old son he would soon be in foster care because his mother “would be dead” and White “would be in jail for killing me.”
Arrington went to the Newport News magistrate’s office the next day to get an emergency protective order.
When White returned at 11:30 p.m., she said, she told him about the protective order and said he needed to leave. When he refused and she said she was calling the police, the complaint said, White grabbed her phone and kept pushing her away as she tried to get it back.
“Mr. White pushed her back onto the bed and placed both hands around her neck, with his thumbs at the center of her throat,” the complaint said. Arrington was “unable to breathe and gasping for air” when White’s aunt — sleeping in the next room — came in and pulled him away.
Arrington said this week that she blacked out briefly. She said she ended up on the floor with White grabbing her by the hair. He pulled a handgun from his waist band, she said, and pointed it at her head, as she heard her son crying from the other room.
“I turned my head and closed my eyes,” she said. “I honestly tried to just pray he didn’t pull the trigger. Or if he did, that it was quick.”
But White “hesitated” in firing, the complaint said, with his aunt coming back into the room and screaming at him to put the gun away. Arrington ran out of the apartment but couldn’t find anyone to help. She came back and used the aunt’s phone to call 911.
White was arrested that night and charged with two felonies — abduction and strangulation — as well as assault and battery, brandishing a firearm, damaging property and interfering with a 911 call.
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Charges dropped
But Arrington and White’s aunt both failed to show up for at least three court hearings in late 2020 and early 2021.
Newport News prosecutors dropped the charges in February 2021 under a provision that allows the charges to brought back later if a witness decides to cooperate.
“Whereas a material witness has failed to appear, the attorney for the Commonwealth declines to prosecute further,” a court order says
But when the Army National Guard deployed Arrington to Iraq in late 2021, she said, she learned that her security clearance was blocked because there was a warrant out for her arrest on a failure to appear charge.
During the process of getting the clearance restored, Newport News prosecutors dropped the charge but asked her to call them when she returned from deployment. But she never called them when she returned a year later.
“I was just excited about spending time with my kids, and it just kind of slipped my mind,” she said.
Asked if she would go forward with the 2018 charges against White now, Arrington said yes.
“It’s just a consequence of his actions,” she said. “He should be held accountable.”
Gwynn and the case’s lead prosecutor, Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jamie Lawson, didn’t immediately return messages Thursday asking whether they would consider bringing back the 2018 charges now.
White declined a media interview at the Newport News City Jail this week before his transfer to Northern Virginia.
Shawn W. Overbey, the criminal defense attorney who represented White in the 2018 case, now sits as a judge on the Newport News Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court bench. He declined to comment.
White is scheduled to appear in court in Prince William County on June 14.
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‘Beautiful person’
Tatyana Cooks, who first met White in 2016, grew up in Alexandria and recently worked at a hospital as an intake administrator, said her aunt, Cassandra Cooks.
“Tatyana was a fun loving and beautiful person,” the family said in a statement this week. “She was overjoyed to be a mother and equally anxious to be an aunt! She was a great big sister/sister-cousin and good friend. You couldn’t ask for a better daughter or niece. We appreciate all of the love and support we are receiving from family and friends.”
Cooks would have turned 31 Tuesday.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
