Jury selection begins in 2022 New Kensington revenge killing trial

Jury selection was set to begin Monday morning in the murder trial of Larry Osborn Nix II, a 47-year-old from West Brownsville charged with killing James Michael Hayes in a parking lot behind Kensington Arms Apartments on New Kensington's 11th Street. Hayes, 31, was found on December 9, 2022, with a gunshot wound to the head. Prosecutors describe the killing as an act of revenge, the culmination of a cycle of violence that began with a robbery and escalated into a failed murder attempt.

The case carries particular weight in Westmoreland County legal history. It is the first prosecution to emerge from the county's first grand jury in decades—a body seated specifically to investigate unsolved cases. The grand jury, which operated for 18 months before being dissolved late last year, heard testimony from witnesses who painted a picture of escalating conflict between the two men. According to their accounts, Nix robbed Hayes. Days later, Hayes attempted to shoot Nix in retaliation. Nix then hunted Hayes down and killed him.

The sequence of events prosecutors laid out hinges on a specific moment: Hayes stopped his vehicle to retrieve a jacket from its trunk when a man matching Nix's description opened fire. Witnesses told the grand jury they saw this shooting. The violence was not contained—41 rounds were fired from three separate guns, all from a distance away from where Hayes' body ultimately lay. The sheer volume of gunfire suggests either multiple shooters or a shooter determined to ensure the job was finished.

Nix's defense rests on a simpler claim: he did not do it. His attorney, Ned Nakles, has argued that prosecutors cannot produce a witness capable of positively identifying Nix as the person who pulled the trigger. This is a fundamental challenge to the state's case. Without eyewitness identification, prosecutors must rely on circumstantial evidence and motive. Assistant District Attorney Katie Ranker Ellwood has indicated that the evidence linking Nix to the earlier robbery and showing that he himself was targeted in a shooting are central to establishing why he would want Hayes dead. "It provides the motive for the homicide," Ellwood said during a pretrial hearing.

Judge Meagan Bilik-DeFazio has already shaped what the jury will and will not hear. She ruled that evidence of Nix robbing Hayes is inadmissible—a significant limitation on the prosecution's ability to establish the chain of events. However, the judge allowed testimony about Hayes' alleged attempt to shoot Nix to proceed. This creates an asymmetry: jurors will hear that Nix was targeted but not that he had robbed his attacker. The judge's rulings suggest she found the attempted shooting probative to motive while finding the robbery too prejudicial or too distant from the actual homicide charge.

As jury selection begins, both sides face the familiar challenge of finding jurors who can weigh circumstantial evidence and motive against the absence of direct identification. The prosecution must convince 12 people that the sequence of events—robbery, attempted murder, then killing—tells a coherent story of revenge. The defense must maintain reasonable doubt about whether Nix was actually the shooter, despite the motive prosecutors have constructed. The trial will test whether a grand jury's investigation into an old, unsolved case can produce a conviction when the fundamental question of identity remains contested.