A 31-year-old Tacoma man accused of recruiting two teenage boys to kill a 16-year-old high school student in retaliation for being robbed by the victim’s friends and trolled online was found guilty Wednesday of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
The Pierce County jury convicted Isiah Davon Martin guilty of all counts in the March 29, 2023, fatal shooting of Larry Marshall III, a Foss High School student and football player who was known to friends and family as Trae.
Martin did not appear to react as the verdict was read in court. He was dressed in a suit with a purple tie and sat in a wheelchair. His defense attorney, Nicholas Franz, had argued during trial that Martin did not know the two teenagers, Devonte Pool and Vincent Bradley III, were going to kill Marshall when he drove them to the Tacoma apartment complex where the shooting occurred and that they alone were responsible for Marshall’s death.
Franz declined to comment following the verdict. The jury, which appeared to be all white and made up of five men and seven women, deliberated for just a few hours before reaching a decision.
Isiah Davon Martin, 31, is convicted for his role in the March 2023 fatal shooting of Larry “Trae” Marshall III, at Pierce County Superior Court on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, in Tacoma, Wash.
In addition to finding that Martin conspired with Pool and Bradley to murder Marshall, the jurors found him guilty of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. Jurors also made special findings that Martin had two firearms during the commission of the crime because his accomplices were armed.
A sentencing hearing was set for July 11. It’s unclear how much prison time Martin faces. First-degree murder carries a minimum sentence of 20 years, and the special findings about Martin being armed with guns will lengthen his punishment. He has previously been convicted of promoting prostitution in Pierce County, a felony, as well as unlawful possession of a firearm.
Pool pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in October for shooting Marshall. Bradley pleaded guilty in October to the same crime. Both were sentenced to 20 years.
All three defendants in the shooting had known gang ties or were members of specific gangs, according to charging documents.
Marshall’s relatives were not in court Wednesday morning to hear the outcome of the case. Seven friends and relatives attended closing arguments Tuesday in a sparsely-populated courtroom.
Prosecutor details case
During closings, deputy prosecuting attorney Brad Hashimoto laid out Marshall’s death as a carefully planned revenge murder with Martin as the mastermind.
Four days before the shooting, Martin was robbed at gunpoint by the victim’s friends while getting a haircut in the Tacoma Mall. Afterward, Marshall and his friends mocked the defendant on Instagram. Humiliated and angry, Martin spent days identifying who had mugged him and scoping out an apartment complex associated with Marshall and his friends until he saw someone he wanted to kill.
“Someone had to die,” Hashimoto said in court.
A 20-year-old man pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery for the barbershop stickup in 2023, and a second defendant’s case remains pending. According to court records, they and four other young adults were arrested for a suspected crime spree that dated to July 2022.
Larry Darnell “Trae” Marshall III is pictured in an undated photograph. Marshall, 16, was identified by the medical examiner as the victim of a fatal shooting March 29, 2023, in Tacoma.
Driving on South Mildred Street the afternoon of the murder, Martin spotted Marshall walking north and made a U-turn in a red Dodge Charger, surveillance video showed. Martin pulled into Lakeside Landing Apartments’ parking lot and backed into a parking spot. Then he waited.
Video played during prosecutors’ closing arguments Tuesday showed Pool, then 17, and Bradley, then 16, exit the vehicle after Marshall walked into the complex. Seconds later, a barrage of gunfire could be heard out of frame.
At least 33 bullets were fired, striking Marshall in the back three times while he ran from his attackers. One bullet exited his neck, Hashimoto said, causing Marshall to bleed to death internally.
Hashimoto said the video in itself was evidence that Martin had made an agreement with Pool and Bradley to murder Marshall.
“There is no other reasonable explanation for this crime, this shooting looking like this and happening in this way unless every single person in that vehicle knew exactly what was going to happen when they pulled into that parking lot,” Hashimoto said.
Other evidence showed Martin was behind the plan to kill Marshall. Hashimoto showed jurors records of Martin communicating with Pool and Bradley on Facetime minutes after he was robbed at the mall March 25. In the following days, the group went to Lakeside Landing Apartments four times. The morning of March 29, Martin purchased head covers and balaclavas.
After the shooting, the group went back to Martin’s apartment, surveillance video showed, where they hung out for seven hours. Hashimoto questioned whether the defendant would have let the teenagers spend time there if he hadn’t authorized Marshall’s killing.
Tacoma Police Department officers were called to a West End apartment complex Wednesday, March 29, 2023, for reports of a person shot. Police said a 16-year-old boy was killed, and detectives are investigating the shooting as a homicide.
The three spent those hours getting rid of evidence, according to Hashimoto. Martin changed his phone number that afternoon and directed Pool to trade away a 9 mm handgun. Later, he deleted the calls and texts he exchanged with the teens before Marshall was killed and then got a new phone.
Hashimoto said evidence presented during the trial showed Martin looked up flights to Portland and fled there. Meanwhile, he kept track of whether Pool or Bradley had been arrested.
“They just cracked my little bro for a [homicide],” Martin texted someone after Bradley was arrested, according to a PowerPoint slide prosecutors used during closings.
Defense attorney disputes evidence
Martin’s defense attorney tried to poke holes in the state’s case during his closing arguments, challenging the jury to find any evidence of Martin’s agreement with Pool and Bradley to carry out the murder in the litany of phone data jurors had seen.
“There is nothing in these that says lets go out and shoot this person, lets go out and shoot these people, let’s go out and do harm of some kind to these people,” Franz said.
According to Franz, Martin was at Lakeside Landing Apartments at Pool’s direction to purchase marijuana. Franz described the two teenagers as the principal actors in Marshall’s death.
“Did [Martin] know the boys were going to do something like this? He did not,” Franz said.
The defense attorney also cast doubt on evidence showing his client visited the apartment complex several times in the day before the shooting to look for targets, noting that Martin had indicated in his own testimony that he had two or three friends who live there or nearby. Franz told jurors that they’d heard other testimony about the fact that cell phone towers that placed Martin there were accurate within one to four blocks.
Franz said Marshall’s death was “sad beyond belief” but that there was no conspiracy as prosecutors had described.
In prosecutors’ rebuttal closing arguments, Hashimoto zoomed out on the context of the fatal shooting, reminding jurors that Bradley and Pool killed the same person who was threatening and mocking Martin days before on Instagram, a platform that had Marshall’s face on it.
“We do not need a contract written in blood,” Hashimoto said. “We do not need that, we don’t need a text, OK. What you need are evidence and reasonable inferences from that evidence. And I submit to you there is no way that this crime happens like this unless there is an agreement.”