Eric Brian Brown
NORFOLK, Va. – The United States Attorney’s Office filed a motion in court Thursday to involuntarily medicate the man accused of abducting and murdering 19-year-old Ashanti Billie.
Billie, a Maryland native, was a freshman at a Virginia Beach college and was working on JEB Little Creek when she disappeared. She was missing for more than a week before her body was found behind a church in North Carolina.
According to court documents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is seeking to restore Eric Brian Brown’s competency to stand trial in Billie’s murder. It requested a hearing on whether or not Brown should be medicated be held no earlier than the first week of November 2019 “in order to provide the parties an adequate opportunity to arrange for expert witness testimony.”
Since Brown’s arrest, staff at the Butner Federal Medical Center has been working to restore his competency to stand trial. A judge ruled Brown could be involuntarily medicated in June 2018, but at a August 2019 hearing, Brown was still considered incompetent to stand trial.
The death penalty was taken off the table by the U.S. Attorney General, but if convicted, Brown still faces a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison.
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