Jessica Chambers Case: Second Trial Declared For Quinton Tellis In The Burning Death Of A Teenager

BATESVILLE, Miss – A Mississippi judge on Monday declared a second murder trial in a man's capital accused of burning a woman in 2014. The blocked jurors said that they could not reach a verdict. Judge Gerald Chatham of the Panola County Circuit said Monday the trial for quashing the Quinton Tellis trial, after the jurors deliberated for two days.

This is the second trial in error; a jury was also unable to decide at the first trial of Tellis last year. Tellis was accused of setting Jessica Chambers on fire.

Chambers, 19, was found severely burned on December 6, 2014, along a road in Courtland, Mississippi, about 70 km south of Memphis. She died a few hours later in a hospital.

As in the first trial, the jurors had to choose between the evidence that prosecutors allegedly linked Tellis to Chambers' death and the testimony of first aiders that they would have heard a dying chamber claiming that a person named Eric l & # 39; He had attacked. Prosecutors attempted to deflect this testimony by calling on a speech-language pathologist who said that Chambers burned too much to be able to express himself clearly.

The first responders who testified described a horrible scene and stated that Chambers had been burned to the point that she was unrecognizable, reports CBS affiliate WREG. EMT Bradley Dixon said it was hard to say what Chambers was saying as speakers repeatedly asked who did this to him.

"It was Erik or Derek or something like that," said another speaker, Josh Perkins.

Tellis faces another murder charge in Louisiana in 2015, when the death of Meing-Chen Hsiao, a 34-year-old Taiwanese student, graduated from the University of Louisiana at Monroe. This indictment alleges that Tellis likely stabbed Hsiao more than 30 times in the face and body to reveal the PIN code of her debit card before killing her on July 29, 2015.