A Newport News Circuit Court jury this week acquitted a 16-year-old who stabbed his father to death during an altercation nearly two years ago.
Azarius Livingston, who was 15 at the time, stabbed his father, Rodney T. Livingston, on March 20, 2018, in his mobile home on Onancock Trail, off Jefferson Avenue in Denbigh.
The teen told police he was in his bedroom at about 7:30 p.m. “when his father came in and started yelling at him about cleaning the bathroom and the bedroom,” according to a search warrant affidavit filed shortly after the incident.
“His father pushed him, and he pushed his father back,” Newport News Police Detective Mike Wachsmuth wrote in the affidavit. “Azarius went and obtained a steak knife from a kitchen cabinet.”
The teen told police he tried to get back into his bedroom to get his cellphone. But his father — then in the living room — pushed him again, with the teen pushing back to get into his room.
Azarius called his mother to come get him.
“His father came back in his bedroom and grabbed the phone out his hand and threw it,” the affidavit said. “His father then pushed Azarius, and Azarius pushed his father back with the knife in his hand.”
The struggle continued — even after the stabbing — before Azarius got out and ran to a neighbor’s house. He called his mother, who told him to call 911. Rodney Livingston was found on the floor of his trailer, stabbed once in the chest.
During a two-day jury trial this week on a charge of first-degree murder, Azarius’ attorney, James O. Broccoletti, offered two defenses: That the stabbing was either accidental or self-defense.
Azarius testified that he had the steak knife in his hand, holding it toward himself, when he went back into his bedroom.
During the shoving, Broccoletti said, the knife got turned around to face his father. “He had kind of forgotten that he had the knife,” the attorney said. “He wasn’t aware of it.”
The knife had a five-inch blade, while the stab wound was “less than three inches deep,” the attorney said. Had he intended to kill his father, the lawyer said, “he would have put it in to the hilt.” The teen also tried to staunch his father’s bleeding, Broccoletti said.
Before Azarius got the knife from the kitchen, Broccoletti said, Rodney Livingston — a construction worker who outweighed his son by about 100 pounds — “threw” a wooden table onto the floor, “breaking it into pieces.”
Rodney also pushed his son into a wall, Broccoletti said, breaking some of the paneling off the wall.
Azarius’ girlfriend testified that she was talking with Azarius on the phone when she heard his father “yelling and screaming,” and then heard voices raised during the altercation. Broccoletti said Rodney Livingston also had been drinking, with a blood alcohol content of 0.11, just above the legal limit for driving drunk.
Azarius Livingston was charged with first-degree murder, based largely on text messages he sent his girlfriend a couple months before he stabbed his father.
In those texts, Azarius was angry at his father for prior arguments and told his girlfriend he was going to kill him at the next opportunity. He said he would make it seem “accidental,” and then “claim it was self-defense.”
Prosecutors asserted that Azarius carried out that exact plan, while Broccoletti contended that those text messages were nothing more than youthful “boasting.”
“We argued that it’s in the wall, it’s in the table,” he said. “It was all in the heat of the moment.”
The case’s prosecutor, Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Travis White, did not return a phone call about the case Friday afternoon.
Jurors had the choice of convicting Azarius of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter — or finding him not guilty at all. After 4.5 hours of deliberation, they found him not guilty.
Broccoletti said Azarius was an honor roll student who was in the International Baccalaureate program at Warwick High School, and had no criminal record before this.
“He’s a great kid, just a bright kid, with no history at all,” Broccoletti said. “He cried on the stand, and he’s very remorseful. That was his dad. He’s going to live with this for the rest of his life … Hopefully he can get back on track.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
