A bank-robbery double homicide in Berea and a 2023 hit on a federal witness in Lexington both carry potential capital charges. The decision rests with a Justice Department that, just last week, published a roadmap for using the death penalty more often.
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Kentucky now have two pending cases in which the Justice Department could authorize seeking the death penalty — a rare convergence in a district that has not produced an executed defendant in modern memory, and one that arrives one week after the Trump administration published a 52-page policy report calling for the federal death penalty to be used more aggressively.
The two cases are very different. One is a witness-murder prosecution against a Lexington gang and the federal defendant who allegedly paid them, charging conduct from September 2023. The other was filed Friday: an FBI complaint accusing an 18-year-old from Somerset of walking into a Berea bank Thursday afternoon and shooting two employees to death.
What links them is a single statute. Federal law allows the death penalty when a defendant uses a firearm to commit murder during a violent crime, and again when a witness is killed to keep them from testifying. Both fact patterns are charged here.
The Berea bank killings
Brailen Weaver, 18, faces a three-count federal complaint accusing him of armed bank robbery, discharging a firearm during a violent crime, and causing two deaths with that firearm. According to an FBI affidavit unsealed Friday, Weaver entered the U.S. Bank branch at 630 Chestnut St. in Berea at 1:57 p.m. Thursday, shot a male customer dead, killed a teller seconds later, checked the cash drawers and ran.
Kentucky State Police identified the dead as Brian Switzer, 42, of Jessamine County, and Breanna Edwards, 35, of Madison County. Both worked at the bank.
Investigators traced the getaway car — a silver BMW with an Alabama plate — to Weaver because he had listed it for sale on his own Facebook page, the affidavit says. Photos on his social media accounts showed him wearing the same shoes and pants the gunman wore. By Thursday night, agents tracked his phone into Lexington, found the BMW on Interstate 75, and pursued him at speeds reaching 130 mph on Newtown Pike before he crashed and ran on foot. He was arrested Friday morning.
Around 8 p.m. on the night of the killings — while still being hunted — Weaver posted a meme on Instagram captioned “I pledge allegiance to da bag,” the affidavit says.
The case is docketed as 5:26-MJ-5088-MAS before U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew A. Stinnett.
The witness murder
The older case has been moving through federal court here for months. On Sept. 29, 2023, Kristopher Lewis, 28, was shot to death in the parking lot of his workplace, Koch Air at 132 Trade Street in Lexington, by three masked men who arrived in a black Acura. Lewis was scheduled to testify two months later in the federal narcotics-and-money-laundering trial of Rollie Deshawn Lamar.
Lamar, who at the time of his arrest had more than $2 million in seized assets, was convicted of the underlying drug charges in February 2024 and sentenced to 18 years. By the time investigators caught up to the Lewis killing, prosecutors say, the trail led to Lamar himself.
A federal grand jury returned an indictment in October 2025 charging six men with the killing: Lamar; alleged shooters William Quejohn Dixon, Daquis Damarr Sharp, Desmond Elijah Bellomy and Jatiece Alvin Parks, who prosecutors say belong to a Lexington gang called the Hot Boyz; and an alleged go-between, Deangalo Montavius Boone. Casey Allison Morris, accused of letting the shooters use her car for surveillance of Lewis in the days before the killing, was indicted in November. Quincino Lamont Waide Jr. was added the same month, charged as an accessory after the fact for allegedly staging a switch vehicle.
Prosecutors say Lamar paid $1,000 in total to have Lewis killed — $250 each to four shooters. Text messages recovered from one of the alleged shooters’ phones the night of the murder, and quoted in court filings, show the men dividing the money.
Five of the eight defendants face charges that carry a maximum sentence of death or life in prison. The case, captioned United States v. Waide et al., 5:25-CR-127-GFVT-MAS, is assigned to U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove. Trial has been continued indefinitely while Justice Department headquarters in Washington decides whether to pursue capital punishment for any of the defendants.
A new federal posture on capital cases
The decision whether to seek the death penalty in any federal case rests with the U.S. attorney general. That decision is now being made under a fundamentally different policy than the one in effect when the Lewis case was indicted last fall.
On April 24, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy released a report titled “Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty.” It rescinded the Biden-era moratorium on federal executions, directed the Bureau of Prisons to reinstate the lethal-injection protocol used during the first Trump administration, and instructed the agency to expand its execution methods to include firing squad. The report says the Justice Department has so far authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants nationwide — nine of them green-lit by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
In a passage describing the Biden administration’s record, the report specifically faulted the prior Justice Department for declining to seek capital punishment in cases involving “gangsters and drug dealers who murdered law enforcement officers, government witnesses, and informants.” The Lewis killing, as charged, fits that description on its face.
DOJ has not announced a decision in either Eastern Kentucky case. Spokespersons for the department do not comment on internal capital-case review.
What capital authorization would mean
If the Justice Department authorizes seeking death in either case, the practical effects in Lexington would be immediate. Each defendant would be entitled to two attorneys, at least one of them “learned counsel” qualified to handle capital cases under federal law. Pretrial schedules typically stretch by years. Jury selection would balloon — capital juries must be “death qualified,” meaning each juror must be willing to consider both a death sentence and a life sentence. Trials would be split into a guilt phase and a penalty phase, with separate evidence and arguments.
There is also the practical reality that no execution in Kentucky — state or federal — has been carried out since 2008, and that Kentucky’s own state-level executions remain enjoined under a court order. The federal protocols are different, and federal executions during the first Trump administration were carried out in Indiana, not Kentucky. But the local effect of a federal capital trial — measured in court time, defense costs, public attention and jury burden — would be felt in Lexington regardless.
Where the cases stand
All defendants in both cases are presumed innocent. In the Lewis case, all eight defendants have pleaded not guilty. In the Weaver case, the complaint is the first formal step; an indictment from a federal grand jury would have to follow within roughly 30 days for the prosecution to proceed.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mary Lauren Melton and G. Todd Bradbury are prosecuting the witness-murder case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky has not yet identified its trial team for the Berea case.
An indictment, complaint, or information is merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
