‘What happened to Codi Bigsby?’
Prosecution begins case in Hampton murder trial
HAMPTON — The mother of Codi Bigsby testified Wednesday she last saw the boy alive when she dropped him off with his father in November 2020. Codi was just shy of 3 years old.
Dina Abdul Kareem said she was hospitalized for part of 2020. But she said she and Codi’s father, Cory Jamar Bigsby, met halfway between Hampton and Washington for Kareem to turn Codi and his brothers over to Bigsby.
But after that, she testified, Bigsby would hardly ever let her speak with her sons. The promised co-parenting agreement, in which she thought the children would spend time at both homes, never happened.
“For the most part I was ghosted,” Kareem said, saying Bigsby never gave her his Hampton address nd that her phone calls, text messages and emails — typically several a month — mostly went unreturned.
About 14 months after the child transfer, on Jan. 31, 2022, Bigsby called Hampton Police to say that one of his sons — 4-year-old Codi — was missing. He told them the boy went to bed in the family’s Buckroe Beach home but was gone by morning.
He has not been found.
Bigsby, now 45, is accused of second-degree murder and concealing a dead body, with prosecutors saying he killed Codi in June 2021, or about seven months before he reported the child missing. Codi would have been 3 then.
During this week’s trial, Hampton prosecutors are expected to introduce statements Bigsby made while in custody that they contend are clear confessions, while defense attorneys are expected to assert that those statements were made under duress and while Bigsby was in a mental
health crisis. One of Codi’s older brothers — now 7 — is expected to testify for the prosecution via a two-way camera.
In early 2021 — just a few months before prosecutors contend Codi was killed — Bigsby told Kareem that 3-year-old Codi was “fondling” his younger brothers, who at that point were a year and a half old. He sent her an email in April of that year.
“He’s still doing the same stuff,” Bigsby wrote, adding an abbreviation for “shaking my head.” Bigsby added that Codi “needs to come back to you” because “I don’t want to severely hurt him,” and that “he needs to see a psychiatrist.”
He never did go back to live with her, she testified Wednesday. But she saw a picture of Codi a couple months later, on June 14, 2021 — the birthday of Codi’s twin brothers. She explained she was “pretty much only able to speak with them on their birthdays.”
When a prosecutor showed her a picture of Codi in front of a refrigerator in his father’s home, she said it didn’t look like the Codi she knew.
“He was a laughing, joking, loving child,” she said. “No issues at all — only love.”
But in the picture, she said, “he looks sad” and “frightened.” That picture, prosecutors contend, was taken about a week before Codi was killed.
Kareem testified that on Jan. 15, 2022 — the day after what would have been Codi’s 4th birthday — she sent Cory an email that asked, “Where are my kids, Cory? Are they alive?” Two weeks later, Hampton police called Kareem in Washington to tell her Bigsby had reported Codi missing. She said she “immediately got on the road and drove to Hampton.” During the conversation with detectives and FBI agents, she told them that Cory had “previously threatened to do violent harm to him.”
On cross-examination, one of Bigsby’s attorneys, Curtis Brown, questioned Kareem’s fitness as a mother.
Brown asked why she didn’t do more to see her children during the 14 months after she turned the boys over — such as driving to Hampton to see them even if Bigsby wasn’t returning her calls.
“I did not want to drag them through a custody battle,” Kareem said, asserting she tried “continuously” to talk to the boys and insisting several times she was a good mother who loved her children.
When Brown questioned her about how she only sent Bigsby $150 for the kids over 14 months, she responded: “That’s all he asked for.”
During opening statements earlier Wednesday, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Dylan Arnold told jurors that they should be asking themselves throughout the trial: “Where is Codi Bigsby? What happened to Codi Bigsby?”
“He suffered abuse at the hands of his father until one day he went too far and killed Codi,” Arnold said. “As the evidence will show, Codi was dead for months when (Bigsby) reported him missing.”
Arnold gave a prelude to the 7-year-old brother’s testimony, saying the boy will “recount the abuse” Bigsby inflicted on Codi and will describe how Bigsby at one point put Codi’s body in a bed next to the brother.
But defense lawyers asserted there’s nothing to the charges against Bigsby.
The jailhouse statements were made while Bigsby was under duress and in a mental health crisis. He was in a deteriorating mental state, was “hearing voices” and the statements simply can’t be trusted, defense attorney Ken Singleton said during his opening statement.
“Evidence will come out that Codi was alive in June 2021, the fall of 2021 and into January of 2022,” Singleton said, telling jurors that it’s not their job to determine where Codi is or why he hasn’t been found.
Finding Cory not guilty, he said, “is not going to be popular, but it will be your only choice.”
It took more than two days to select 14 jurors — the 12-member panel plus two alternates. Potential jurors were asked whether they read news coverage of the case, what they think of the idea convicting someone of murder even without a body, and whether they automatically discount a 7-year-old’s testimony because of his age. It took two days to arrive at 26 qualified jurors from panels of 69.
Then, on Wednesday morning, attorneys from both sides were allowed to each cut six jurors of their own choosing.
But Brown objected to the prosecution’s cuts, asserting that prosecutors culled out four Black jurors out of its six. Some of those, he asserted, appear to have been cut solely “because they are Black.”
Prosecutors objected in reverse, asserting that Bigsby’s lawyers cut three white people from the list solely because of their race.
“How is race a consideration or a factor in this case?” Circuit Court Judge James Hawks asked, noting that the defendant and victim — Codi — are Black.
Brown responded that Black jurors have been proven to be “a little more sympathetic — they will try to give a Black person a benefit of the doubt.”
Under U.S. Supreme Court case law, while each side has plenty of discretion on determining which jurors to cull from the panel, they have to have reasons other than race when doing so.
In the end, both sides convinced Hawks that they struck people from the list for reasons other than race — for example, that those would-be jurors appeared to be “falling asleep” or distracted during jury selections, that one had health issues and another was a victim of a violent crime. They ended up with a panel of 10 white and four Black jurors.