URBANA — When the sun broke through the clouds Wednesday morning after days of rain, Marla Rice thought it was a sign that a guilty verdict was approaching in the murder case for the man accused of shooting his son.

He was right.

Nearly three years after the fatal shooting of 29-year-old Kristian Philpotts, Rice said Chief Judge Randy Rosenbaum’s decision to grant a guilty verdict to 19-year-old Tyjohn Williams of Champaign was “the first step towards justice.”

“This won’t bring him back, but it has initiated justice because someone has to be held accountable. “This person is now answering for his actions,” he said.

Williams was found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in the death of Mr. Philpotts on January 12, 2022.

That evening, Mr. Philpotts, or “KP” as his friends call him, was driving to Lyft to take Williams and two other teenagers (La’Shown Fenderson and Jaheim Dyer) to Williams’ hair appointment.

Mr. Philpotts was saving money to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago for a veterinary medicine degree after earning a bachelor’s degree from Illinois State and a master’s degree from Eastern Illinois, both in pre-veterinary medicine.

“He had become a vet by now because we are looking at almost three years in the future. “He would be out of school,” Rice said Wednesday. “We were robbed. My family was robbed. “He was one of the most outgoing, loving, funniest people.”

According to Dyer and Fenderson’s testimony during the trial, Williams became nervous as the vehicle approached its destination and asked to be taken back home.

At one point during the ride, she called her mother and told her that Lyft would change her route because she was the one who had planned the ride through the app in the first place.

No witnesses indicated that Mr. Philpotts refused to change course or engaged in any verbal altercation before Williams produced his firearm and shot him.

Rice described her son’s killing as senseless following the information she heard during the investigation and trial.

“I haven’t heard one single reason, one single reason,” he said. “There is no reason, there is nothing. “My son was just killed.”

As the investigation continued, Urbana police could only share so much with Mr. Philpotts’ family. The hearing was their first time hearing the full story.

“It was really hard to relive my son’s final moments and what happened to him after he was shot,” Rice said. “It was a little disturbing.”

Both Fenderson and Dyer pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in 2022 for taking the murder weapon and Williams’ shoes from Mr Philpotts’ vehicle and hiding them immediately after the incident, and for lying to police in the early stages of the investigation.

Several relatives of Williams testified during the hearing. The events they described did not always match the accounts of other relatives, the evidence found by the police, and the statements of two eyewitnesses.

Williams’ mother, for example, said she had not seen or heard from him since the last call she received minutes after the shooting.

But prosecutors showed part of a videotaped interview Williams gave after his arrest in March 2022; Here, Williams said his mother picked him up after the shooting and he stayed in town with his uncle for two weeks before heading to Georgia. was found later.

Williams’ aunt claimed that on the night of the shooting, Fenderson told her he had “shot the Uber” but that she did not tell the police or anyone else about it.

In his final decision, Rosenbaum summarized much of the evidence presented by both the prosecution and defense and highlighted where it did not match.

“I hate to make this blanket statement, but I think almost every civilian witness lied,” Rosenbaum said, referring to both the trial and the investigation as a whole.

Even so, he found enough corroborating evidence to determine Williams’ guilt.

Williams’ sentencing is scheduled to be announced on January 30. Rice said he trusted Rosenbaum’s decision but prayed for a life sentence.

“He took a life, he should be in prison for life,” he said. “I don’t want another family in those seats” in the courtroom.

Rice had been advocating for better security for ride-hailing drivers, but now, especially after the hearing, she said she wants to advocate against gun violence more broadly.