Brenton Gatlin was shot and killed in July 2017. Since then, three people were arrested and indicted, each accused of participating in the robbery and shooting that left the 27-year-old Gatlin dead.

It wasn’t until January 2020 that a trial was held for one of the three. Marty Gene Stafford III was convicted of felony murder, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, it would take another seven months before he received a life sentence in prison.

On Monday, another of the three — Kandes Elizabeth Lambert — will see the start of their trial. Like Stafford, she was indicted on charges of reckless murder, felony murder and first-degree robbery. Athens Police have said the group was at Lambert’s home on Horton Street attempting to steal cash from Gatlin when he was shot.

The trial will also be the first criminal jury trial to be held in Limestone County since the pandemic began. Limestone County District Attorney Brian Jones said his office is “very excited” to finally be trying the cases they’ve been staring at over the last year.

“What was so frustrating about COVID is that it just shut us all down,” Jones said. “It’s frustrating for us, it’s frustrating for the victims, and now that we’ve been given the green light, we’re going to take advantage of that and get as many tried as we possibly can.”

Jury trials were shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic and set to resume in October, but only a civil trial has been managed so far. A case from 2016, also involving multiple people charged with murder, was initially set to begin Monday, but because the defendant was charged with capital murder and there were concerns about the number of jurors, the case was continued until September, allowing for Lambert to be tried instead, Jones said.

He said during the shutdown, he’s had a daily reminder of the backlog of cases waiting to be tried — a “murder board” with the names of local homicide cases and with stickers showing how far they’ve gotten in the case and what they have left to do.

“It’s very frustrating to sit here every single day and look at this list of homicide cases that there’s nothing I can do to try until the system restarts,” Jones said, adding he ran out of space for additional names on the board during the shutdown.

He said the courts are focusing on non-capital cases right now, and to help with the backlog, his office has hired two more lawyers — Morgan Price, who previously served as a law clerk in Madison County; and Bill Lisenby, a retired attorney who worked with Jones when the now D.A. was fresh from law school.

“I tease him a little bit, because he’s the one who trained me,” Jones said. “I was able to talk him out of retirement. It’s a lot of fun (working with him).”

Among the cases they hope to try after Lambert are the third defendant in the Gatlin murder, Terry Dale Amerson. According to a pretrial motion filed this week, Lambert, Amerson and Stafford planned to rob Gatlin of his tax refund money by having Lambert lure Gatlin to her home, where Amerson and Stafford would be.

After Gatlin was shot, records state Amerson called 911 and was at the home with Lambert when police arrived. Stafford was found the next day at a nearby residence, records show.

Gatlin’s mother-in-law told The News Courier after Stafford’s trial that the Gatlin family was already in crisis when the murder occurred, as Gatlin and his wife had recently learned their young daughter’s brain cancer had returned a second time.