It's like a trail of victims
as you were walking into the house.
We were thinking that this guy
was just a cold-hearted killer.
For those most affected by a homicide...
I just can't even begin to put into words
how much life has changed.
The first 48 is just the beginning.
There's the suspect.
These three murders were committed
within six minutes.
This crime was not random.
This is the story of the fight for justice...
My client was in fear he would be killed.
He could say anything.
In the weeks, months, and years...
The defense only has to convince one person
of their story, and we lose.
After the first 48.
I'd always been interested in policing
ever since I was a young kid.
As soon as I started, I just fell in love with it.
I was the investigator on call.
When I heard triple homicide, I was very shocked.
They don't happen very often anywhere,
you know, especially in Gwinnett County.
You know, you get the chills. Body temperature goes up.
It's my first triple.
we know that two of them are still at the house,
and the third one ended up not making it
on the way to the hospital.
The victim at the hospital
is a 45-year-old Black male.
He suffered three bullet wounds to the chest
and was shot once in the back, shoulder, and leg.
When Loomis and I pulled up,
there are so many things that are running through your head
at that time.
Victim was sitting kind of propped up,
leaning against the door.
There's two dead bodies in the house.
The homeowner?
He was inside the house.
Robert Caverly.
64-year-old Robert Caverly,
known as Bob, worked as a maintenance engineer.
He is survived by his mother and three brothers.
So the guy in the garage,
we have no clue who he is.
The second victim, we didn't have any identification on him.
It could be the shooter.
Yeah.
We didn't know where the suspect was.
It increases your stress level.
You never know if he's gonna go keep on killing after that.
So we called the K-9 unit out.
Any available means at our department
to find this person, they're willing to provide it.
Air units join the search using
thermal imaging cameras that can track body heat.
Sounds good.
Oh.
We saw a 9-millimeter pistol
that had been dropped in the grass that had blood on it.
There was a car door open.
We knew something had taken place outside.
We're trying to process all this.
Your senses are so heightened because you're just
trying not to miss anything.
As we're walking in the garage,
the second victim,
he's just laying on the floor in the corner.
Yeah, I see it.
He looks like a younger white male, maybe 20s.
And there were some glasses, but they were broken
right there on the steps.
The victim in the garage was shot four times,
once in his head and back and twice in his legs.
The team finds 14 .40 caliber casings
at the scene.
I don't know.
In the living room...
He was like that
with the pooling of the blood.
The homeowner, Bob, has one gunshot wound
to his chest and one to his arm.
There's a shell casing.
Both casings are 9-millimeter.
Bob was an older man.
It appeared he was shot either coming down the stairs
and/or while he was trying to get out the front door.
You know, at this point, we were thinking
that this guy was just a cold-hearted killer.
Like he was dead set on looking for something,
because it's like a trail of victims
as you were walking into the house.
Upstairs...
As we were going through the residence,
we located a child's bedroom.
I did it myself. OK.
And they never had seen this young child,
so we were very concerned.
Worst-case scenario is whoever committed
the three homicides took the child with them
that we possibly have a kidnapping that occurred.
Then...
Homeowner here, directly to the left.
He said the Bob guy had just gotten a roommate.
Maybe a few months ago or earlier this year.
There was a kid--
Black girl was with a kid?
Yeah, and then a female.
So it wasn't Bob's kid?
No, no. - Yeah.
So we reached out to the Gwinnett School Police
to try and find out, hey, are there any students
that live at this house?
That way we could find some kind of--
you know, the name of the kid
and also if there's an emergency contact.
There was a huge sense of urgency to locate the child.
If we did have a kidnap scenario,
that changes up absolutely everything.
Two hours in, as officers search
for the child...
The dog was able to pick up a scent.
And then, just one block from the crime scene...
This discovery, it's a big deal.
Having narcotics in the bag, having additional guns,
it shows that there's likely a motive
behind why this person had come here
and committed these crimes.
But it also makes you wonder, what's his end game?
Air One checked the swamp.
They've got no heat, so there's--
I have nowhere to redeploy to try anything.
We're all pretty tense.
The worst thing that could happen in this case,
you know, having the killer on the loose,
is that he could go and do more home invasions
and ultimately hurt more people.
Three and a half hours in...
Hey, Lieutenant Bozeman's got the number
for the five-year-old's mom.
The school police were able to tell us
who was the guardian of the child.
She's in a hotel in Norcross.
The woman is the fiancée of the victim
who died at the hospital.
Hey, this is Corporal Loomis with Gwinnett Police.
How are you?
We were trying to get in touch with you
just to make sure you're OK.
And were you here earlier today at all?
She says she left the house two days ago
after a fight with her fiancé.
OK.
Loomis asks her about the missing child.
We're just curious, is he with you?
We were all real relieved.
The child was with one of her relatives,
so that was a lot of weight off our shoulders.
Who else was here at the house who wore glasses?
33-year-old Steven Finch
worked as a filleter for a local seafood company.
He leaves behind his parents, two sisters, and two brothers.
She says she spoke with her fiancé
on the phone a few hours ago,
and he was hanging out with Steven.
Did they say what they were gonna do today?
Um, it was bad.
OK? I'm sorry.
He--he passed away.
I'll be there soon, OK?
She hung up.
It's tough.
It's hard to not get emotional
because it's almost like you're there with them,
because you can just feel their emotions through the phone.
Four hours in...
Are you Jennifer?
Loomis and Corporal Smith
meet the fiancée of the victim who died at the hospital.
We were trying to learn about the other victims
so we could figure out if they had
any enemies or any relationships
with family members that were going sour,
anything like that whatsoever.
When was the last time you were at the house?
Family of Steven and the family of Bob
were kind of bewildered how this even occurred.
When you lose a loved one in a traumatic situation
where you don't have any time to prepare, there's no goodbye,
it's just a sudden tearing of this person out of your life.
Jessica Gatlin, Steven Finch's sister,
shared some of his drawings that he did,
which are just kind of incredible.
He was a very artistic, musically inclined person.
He was her best friend. They grew up together.
He loved his family dearly, just like Bob.
Bob was the kind of guy that if you needed him,
he was gonna be there.
That house was the location where everything took place.
He took people in that needed a place to stay.
He met the first victim. He took him in.
They are not just a body that's left behind.
They are also a brother, a son, a friend, a neighbor.
Their lives mattered.
What's his name?
Four hours after the shooting deaths of Bob,
Steven, and the first victim...
As we're talking to her, she says she thinks
she may know who's involved with this.
She said that her boyfriend was involved with some drugs.
She says Justin thought her fiancé
had set his brother up.
So we were able to look up that police call,
and we figured out who this Justin's brother was.
And then we were able to figure out that Justin
is actually Justice Lusk.
This is Justin?
OK.
She identifies 21-year-old
Justice Lusk as the man she knows as Justin.
Justice works in landscaping.
He has no prior convictions.
That gave us our first lead in the case
on who to go look for.
But just because someone gives you a name
doesn't give you enough probable cause
to just go arrest them.
We're gonna try and find where this person is right now
so we can try and backtrack his movement
and put them at the scene.
So Mellow on scene says they were able to access
the Ring camera across the street.
All right, let's go.
It's amazing the smallest things
that could give you hope in a case.
Loomis and I, we were both trying
to get the same information at the same time,
to find out who the suspect was.
There was quite a few doorbell cams
in the cul-de-sac down there.
And you could tell one of them had a very good view.
You want to come watch this video?
I got it pulled up.
There's the suspect.
Camry drops him off.
He's wearing sweatpants and, like,
a bluish or grayish hoodie.
It wasn't like a scream.
It wasn't like, "Who are you?"
It was, you know,
"Don't come in here starting that."
That let me know, hey, these people knew each other.
Car leaves.
Most likely an Uber.
He gets shot.
You can see him run out.
And it caught the first victim
running out of the garage to the neighbor's house
where he collapsed.
The other car comes back.
More gunfire.
He takes off.
I would assume the suspect called for a ride.
His driver freaked out and took off.
Shortly after a large volley of gunshots,
you see the suspect emerge
from the house carrying a backpack
and a blanket stuffed with stuff.
And he tries to get into another rideshare
that was for another neighbor's house.
Then he takes off in-between these two houses.
Unfortunately, we couldn't catch
any faces of the suspect.
The visual was too far away.
I think we're really close.
So the next thing we figured we needed to do was
an urgent request to Uber and Lyft
to try and figure out if they had someone
who dropped someone off in this cul-de-sac
at this time.
Seven hours in...
Hello?
All right.
I got the residence he was picked up at
which matches back to his family's residence.
So we knew exactly who it was.
I love it. Teamwork.
While detectives head out to begin surveillance
on Justice Lusk's house...
The plan is to get the Uber driver back.
At that point, I had a name on who to look at.
So another way to verify that this was Justice Lusk,
put his driver's license photo into a photographic lineup,
because you know, what if someone else
had Justice's phone
and was using his own Uber account?
So I was hoping that he could be
another piece for my puzzle.
OK, bud, how you doing?
Good.
Sergeant Richter shows the driver a map
of the cul-de-sac where the shooting took place.
Do you remember this particular customer?
OK, so what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna show you
a group of six photographs, OK?
Basically, look at the pictures.
If you recognize somebody, tell me which one and why.
He picked it.
He positively identified Justice Lusk
in a photo line-up.
OK, do you want to just circle the number
and initial it?
At that point, I got enough for probable cause
to take warrants on him.
I felt very confident that Justice was the person
who committed all these crimes.
You're gonna have to do a search warrant
at that house. Yeah.
I mean, it would be nice to get him off
the streets tonight.
We had Major Restrepo and Corporal Mellow
getting ready to spin up their SWAT team
and do a search warrant on Lusk's address.
As the team prepares
to hit Justice's house...
There's a call from a neighboring house
around the corner from the incident location.
The officer pulls over the suspicious vehicle.
Yes, sir.
Your suspect's 1095.
They just stopped him. I said, who's in the car?
He says Justice.
So I said, put him in handcuffs.
Man, it was a huge sense of relief.
We couldn't believe that he came back.
You know, looking back, we should have known
that maybe he's gonna come back for this stuff he had hid.
But at the time when you have all this stuff going on
in your head and have so much to do,
the simplest, littlest thing you may just overlook.
- Cheers. - Cheers. Good work.
11 hours into the investigation...
Justice, how you doing?
Our goal is to get him to talk to us
and see if we can figure out why he committed these crimes.
So the reason why they saw your car
and came about is some people
saw you walking behind their house.
And what were you looking for back there?
Where's your friend live?
We really took our time.
We didn't wanna go in there right away
and just go at him.
We wanted him to get real comfortable with himself.
We wanted to know how he knows these people,
where he was earlier, where he came from,
and just kind of walk him right into that garage.
You scared some people walking behind their houses.
Why wouldn't you just drive the car around?
Mm-hmm.
Justice claims he was trying
to get to the victim's house,
where he had left a gun several days ago.
What kind of gun is it?
When was the last time you shot a gun?
His vibes were almost, like, relaxed.
Like he didn't really care that he was there.
Why were you going this late to get that stuff?
He was acting like a child the way
he was answering questions, his demeanor.
Like, just--just didn't think he did anything serious.
He was completely calm.
What about this afternoon?
Were you there this afternoon?
How'd you get there today?
Uber?
What happened when you got there?
OK.
But you walk into the garage?
Yeah, you do.
Of course, Loomis and I both know that that's a lie.
At that point, we had enough.
We had let Justice tell us, you know, all the lines of BS.
So at that point, you know, we're showing them
a couple cards that we got in our hands.
You know what's amazing about that cul-de-sac, Justice?
- What? - All the video cameras.
At that point, I was, like,
oh, we got him. You're ours.
His shoulders slumped. He leaned over.
His eyes were going back and forth, trying to think
of the next thing to say.
You get out of the white Toyota Camry Uber,
and you walk into the garage.
And who do you talk to in the garage?
Justice admits he spoke with
the first victim, the man who died at the hospital.
What were y'all arguing about?
I can see how that would be upsetting.
We're just trying to figure out why you left your guns
over there initially.
He was providing information to me.
So as long as he's gonna keep going,
I'll just be polite and see if he responds to that.
He claims the first victim
was carrying a 9-millimeter.
OK.
And did you shoot him because he had a gun?
Or--
That didn't make any sense.
Justice knew this guy. They had made that arrangement.
I don't know why he assumed that, you know,
the first victim was gonna just come up and shoot him.
Is that the black and silver one in the front yard?
How many times did you shoot him,
the second guy that was in the garage?
He admits shooting the second victim,
Steven Finch.
Which one did you use to shoot them?
So you go in the house?
OK, is that when Bob, the old white dude,
is coming down the steps?
How many times do you shoot him?
It was extremely surprising that he so easily
confessed to shooting all three people in the house.
That rarely happens.
You regret what you did?
He didn't say yes or no,
but he had zero remorse.
It appeared that he did not care
he just took three lives, whatsoever.
All he cared about was getting his stuff back.
12 hours into the investigation...
Turn. Put your hands behind your back.
Justice Lusk is charged with
three counts each of felony murder
and aggravated assault.
After the arrest, it's just the beginning.
The district attorney's office is the ones
who are gonna prosecute the case.
We expected that Justice Lusk's defense
was gonna be self-defense,
and we had to prove that it wasn't.
It was a triple homicide, which is pretty horrifying,
and the facts were quite unusual.
The defendant took an Uber to the house.
This occurred in the afternoon, broad daylight.
Those are things that cause a jury to wonder,
like, well, maybe-- maybe he is innocent.
Maybe this was self-defense
because no one would commit a murder that way.
And with triple homicide,
we have to prove murder three times.
I was assigned as co-chair for the prosecution in this case.
Honestly, when I looked at it,
I didn't know what to make of it.
It's one guy, three other men.
We didn't know how this situation happened.
We knew that we would have to rely
on the Ring camera footage
to map out the timeline from when
the defendant arrived and left.
The first gunshot happened in less than two minutes
after the defendant's arrival.
And then we heard other gunshots throughout.
These three murders were committed within six minutes.
You know, that's a very short period of time.
To me, that means he had a motive.
He went directly there to commit those crimes.
And there wasn't much time for anything else.
Unfortunately, it did not show anything
that happened in the garage or inside the house.
And that's the hard part.
That side of the story is left for the defendant.
That puts us at a disadvantage because he could say anything.
And the defense only has to convince
one person of their story,
and we have a hung jury, and we lose.
In regards to self-defense, you have to establish
factually that the shooter, Justice,
had no choice, that he was in fear he would be killed.
I was Justice Lusk's attorney.
Everyone in this country is entitled
to a vigorous ethical defense.
It's not our job to get somebody off,
but it is our job to hold the state
to their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
And it's important to me.
He's gotta to know that I'm working
for him and on his behalf.
And in Justice's case, he's saying,
yeah, I shot, but I was defending myself.
Nearly four years after the murders,
the trial begins.
It was crucial for the jury to see the crime scene
to really get the full picture of what happened in that garage
and also in the home.
So we called the crime scene investigator.
She collected evidence via photograph from the scene.
She collected tangible evidence from the yard.
We were trying to show the jury that this crime
was not random, that it was planned
and that it was thought through.
The investigator states seven guns
were recovered in total.
And there's one the defense homes in on.
The bloodied gun found outside
was the crux of his case.
Because there was a round chambered inside of it,
and there was blood located on the side of the weapon,
he tried to argue that it belonged to a victim.
A gun found on scene is relevant,
especially if it's not the alleged perpetrator's gun,
because that implies that the people in that household
or who were there at the time were armed.
With a round in the chamber being loaded,
that's obviously a clear, present threat to Justice.
There is some argument for it belonging to a victim.
But where the gun was located in the yard,
no victim ever walks in that direction.
So when you look on the Ring cameras
from when Justice Lusk arrives to when he leaves,
he's the only person that ever walks in that direction.
And that is only their statement
that that gun belonged to one of our victims.
There was is no evidence that it did.
The state calls its final witness.
The medical examiner's testimony and the autopsies
completely contradict Justice Lusk's position
that he was facing some type of imminent threat.
So with victim one,
there were six gunshot wounds or grazes.
The positioning of the grazes are interesting
because his graze is across the chest.
And what Dr. Terry said was that it looks like that graze
was connected to the entry wound from his shoulder,
meaning that he was shot several times
while being in a lower position.
Mr. Steven Finch, in the way Steven was found,
it looked like he was sitting in a chair.
And then he gets shot in the knee.
He falls over right in that doorway,
and then Justice Lusk actually walks over him
and shoots him in the head.
He was shot in the back of his head,
facing away from the shooter.
That, to me, is indicative that he was not
being aggressive towards him.
Of course the state is gonna argue
that that person was turning away.
But the counterargument is still there that that person
still may have been armed.
Still doesn't mean that a split second prior
to being shot, they didn't pose a threat or danger
to the person who shot them.
And during cross,
the defense focuses on another detail in the ME's report.
All three of the decedent's cases,
they all had either cocaine, cocaine metabolites,
THC, or amphetamines, or methamphetamine
in their system.
That could have jacked them up,
made them aggressive.
I think the defense wants to bring this up
because they want to muddy any sympathy
that the jurors could have for the victims.
In the perfect world,
it shouldn't matter
whether they're perfect people or not.
But we know this isn't a perfect world.
What these reports don't show
is when these drugs were ingested.
Could have been days prior.
These are blood screens.
We don't know that those drugs had any effect on them at all.
And if Justice Lusk decided to stay at his own home
and not enter Robert Caverly's home,
this wouldn't have happened.
The prosecution rests,
and the defense calls its sole witness to the stand.
Justice wanted to be heard.
I said, and you've got a story to tell.
They need to hear how frightened you were,
that you thought it was your life at stake.
If he did a good job, maybe you'd have one,
maybe two people who would give him
the benefit of the doubt.
We didn't need to convince all 12.
Just one.
Justice wanted to get his story out there.
I said, get up there.
The jury who is deciding your fate
needs to hear from you.
Justice Lusk takes the stand.
Justice went over there to retrieve
his gun that was collateral for purported loan
with decedent number one.
And so he came in contact with decedent number one,
and decedent number two was close by.
He felt threatened by both of them.
So he did what he felt justified that he had to do,
because he felt his life was in jeopardy.
His thought process was to go in the house
and retrieve what he felt was his property
when he encountered decedent number three.
And again, same situation.
He shot his way through the house
and then tried to assert that Robert Caverly
was the aggressor and trying to kill him the entire time,
which was absolutely ridiculous.
You crossed paths with Bob,
and you're going upstairs. He's coming downstairs.
He then goes into garage,
finds one dead body, a pool of blood
where the other victim had been.
Instead of running and getting out of there,
he's gonna pick up the gun and come in after you?
You manage to kill him,
and then you stop to pick up the gun
and run outside and drop it.
That's a very convoluted story and just defies common sense.
He wasn't there to burglarize.
He was there to get his property back,
and he defended himself.
The defendant argued
that he was justified to use self-defense
on three different occasions
as he entered someone's home unlawfully.
Sims begins her cross-examination.
I just knew I need to
hammer him with the lies,
let the jury see that he's not credible.
On the stand, he said the gun was
pulled out and pointed at him, which would be a threat.
That's not what he originally told the police.
And I had to correct him and say you felt threatened.
So he cleaned up for trial,
how he could lay the proper grounds
for a self-defense argument.
You tie that in with the fact that the defendant
himself had no injuries.
He even admitted that he was never actually shot at.
So you want us to believe that the victim had this gun
pointed at you and that you were able
to get your gun out and fire off five rounds
at our victim, and he never fired back at you?
So when you felt threatened, why didn't you leave?
And he answered, because I came here to get my guns.
OK, so now that you've had to kill someone,
why didn't you leave?
And he's responding, I was there for my guns.
I'm going to leave with my guns.
We wanted to make it clear
that nothing was gonna stop you.
No matter what you had to do,
you were there to get your gun.
It shows something different about his nature and who he is.
The jury leaves to deliberate.
Waiting for the verdict is almost
the worst part of the trial.
You have no idea what they're thinking.
For families, I think it's even more difficult,
especially when hearing the evidence,
and they feel like it's clear.
Later that afternoon...
The only part that's worse
than waiting for them to come back is
when they actually tell us, we have a verdict.
You don't want to be the one responsible
for letting a murderer go.
The defendant was found guilty
on all counts.
I think this case is a great example of the system working.
He was given a fair trial.
He was given a fantastic defense attorney.
He was able to tell his story.
And, ultimately, a jury of his peers made the decision,
and the judge enforced it.
The families were extremely relieved,
but there was still so much unresolved
because they never did hear why.
I've tried to set expectations with them
to understand, nothing about this process
is going to bring your loved one back.
You still lost this person.
Speak to a therapist, lean on your loved ones.
Don't let the court process be your only source of healing.
Steven was my younger brother.
Every moment of our life growing up was spent together.
I have my good days and my bad days
when it comes to dealing with it.
- Come in. - Yes, ma'am.
Sharing their grief...
Jessica, may I give you a hug?
Steven's sister Jessica
and Bob's mother, Mary, have become friends.
We have something that binds us together now.
Yes, ma'am. They were special people.
Yes.
We learned after Steven passed,
there was a guy at his funeral,
and he said that my brother had found him
sleeping up under a bridge, and it was cold.
And Steven said, come on,
you're gonna go home with me tonight.
And Steven gave him a place to stay for the night.
So they were a lot alike.
Yes.
I just can't even begin to put into words
how much life has changed.
It changes you forever.