A dice game in Abbeville turned deadly on the evening of Monday, August 26, 2024, when a large group gathered under a pavilion at Herod Village Apartments on Martin Luther King Drive. An altercation broke out and one player produced an illegally modified automatic weapon and fired multiple shots into the crowd. Twenty-year-old Jarrian Jaquan Bernard was struck three times — left shoulder, right shoulder and right wrist — and later died from his wounds. A second man, 26-year-old John’Trell Rice, suffered two gunshot wounds to the center of his chest and his left shoulder and was taken to a hospital.

For more than six months the alleged shooter was at large. On April 8, 2025, St. Landry Parish deputies arrested 21-year-old D’Jacqney Poppy Mitchell on outstanding warrants and transferred him to the Abbeville Police Department; he was booked on charges including first-degree murder in Bernard’s death and attempted first-degree murder in Rice’s shooting, with bond set at $750,000.

Did anyone at Herod Village Apartments that night or nearby see what led to the altercation or who fired the weapon?