The Supreme Court of Georgia on Sept. 16, 2025, affirmed the conviction of Jquantae Jester for felony murder and concealing the death of another in the killing of Myra Smith Parlier and upheld the trial court’s sentence of life without parole for felony murder and 10 consecutive years for concealing a death. The court’s opinion, written by Presiding Justice Warren, found no reversible error in the trial court’s rulings and noted that all the justices concurred.

The court summarized the core evidence against Jester. Investigators found Parlier’s body on Jan. 16, 2022, inside a large black plastic container on the shoulder of I-75 near Lake Allatoona. The medical examiner concluded Parlier died of asphyxia and testified that moisture inside a trash bag covering Parlier’s head indicated she was still breathing when the bag was placed there. Surveillance and financial records showed that Parlier’s EBT and credit cards were used after her body was discovered; surveillance videos and account activity linked those transactions to Jester and Rashad Boone. Investigators recovered Parlier’s identification, financial documents, and jewelry from a moving truck Jester and Boone had been using. A latent-fingerprint expert testified that Jester’s fingerprints were on the container, the packing tape, and the trash bag covering Parlier’s head. Cell-site location information for a phone associated with Jester placed that phone near Parlier’s house on Jan. 14–15 and moving north on I-75 near the time the body was dumped.

The court recited Jester’s recorded statements to investigators as additional evidence. In an afternoon interview on March 7, 2022, Jester said he confronted Parlier about a shotgun she had sold, “got angry,” and “wrapped [a rope] around her throat and strangled her” and then “took a bag and covered it over her head and [he] suffocated her” and held the bag “until she stopped breathing.” The court concluded many particulars of that statement were corroborated by independent evidence, including the medical examiner’s findings, fingerprints, the container’s apparent storage location in Parlier’s house, and the postmortem use of Parlier’s financial accounts.

Background and procedural history provided by the opinion state that Parlier’s body was found Jan. 16, 2022; a Fulton County grand jury indicted Jester in May 2022; a mistrial occurred in March 2023; Jester’s second trial ran May 17–30, 2023; and after conviction the trial court denied his amended motion for new trial in Nov. 2024. The Supreme Court docketed the case for its April 2025 term and issued this decision in September 2025.

The court addressed multiple claims raised on appeal — including the admission of other-acts evidence, the absence of a specific jury instruction on confession corroboration, and alleged discovery violations tied to an expert witness — and concluded that, even assuming some errors occurred, they were harmless given the weight of corroborating evidence. The opinion cited precedent on harmless-error review and explained that jurors were instructed on the limited use of other-acts evidence and that corroboration required by OCGA § 24-8-823 was satisfied by independent proof of several confession particulars.

The judgment of the Superior Court of Fulton County was affirmed. All the justices concurred.