Good Guy with a Gun #253: Cincinnati, OH

Police called it self-defense. A grand jury said it might be murder. A jury, a year later, agreed with the police. | Original incident: July 12, 2024

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.

Nyema Norton, 29, had an ongoing feud with 23-year-old Akira Fletcher. Fletcher had even made a formal complaint saying that Norton had pointed a handgun at her on May 20.

At 2:30 AM on July 12, 2024, in a parking lot behind the Avondale Mall Center, Norton and her cousin smashed Fletcher’s car windows and slashed her tires. Fletcher was six months pregnant at the time.

Fletcher called 911. Later, in August, she posted to Facebook about the incident, saying “I was being punched in my face, rocks thrown at me, and Nyema trying to get in my car. She busted my driver side window out to attack me, she continued to try and get in my car to stab me and I let her hit me while I was on the phone with 911 asking for help.”

(I don’t see video evidence of that — she recorded video, but I would think that stopped during the call — and I haven’t heard the 911 call, but that’s her story.)

Then, when Norton and her cousin were walking away, Fletcher called out to them, “You should be happy you don’t get clapped. You should be happy you don’t get clapped.”

Let’s be clear: Fletcher shouldn’t have done that. She broke several common-sense rules of self-defense.

• Let the police do their job. She had called 911, and she wasn’t initially in imminent danger.

• When the other people are disengaging, don’t re-engage. She opened her car door and called out to the other two women. It doesn’t matter how emotionally involved you might be or how violated you might feel: She’s lucky that this didn’t count as “creating the situation” that led to the shooting.

• If you have video of an incident, keep it between you and your defense lawyer. She published her videos to Facebook, tagging a bunch of news outlets along the way, four days after Norton died. (We’ll get to that.)

That said, words don’t merit a violent response — and Norton, who had a brick and a knife, reached into Fletcher’s vehicle and started to swing something — it looked like a rock to me — while Fletcher was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Fletcher shot four times, wounding both aggressors. They both went to the hospital; Norton died on August 24, almost six weeks later.

She had called the police. Her windows were shattered and her tires flattened, and she hadn’t shot the women while they had been doing that to her car. The police even said it was self-defense. Despite all that, Fletcher was charged with murder, aggravated murder, and felonious assault. A grand jury indicted her.

WKRC Local 12 contacted Jay Clark, a local criminal defense attorney, and asked him to look at the videos.

I’ll be honest with you; I’m kind of surprised they charged her, seeing what I see now. Now, that said, we don’t know what that second woman told them. And at the time, police didn’t have this [video] necessarily.

He commented specifically on the line, “You should be happy you don’t get clapped,” indicating that it probably didn’t count as escalation: “Because in hindsight, she had the ability to “clap” her and did not.”

I recommend you check out the WKRC Local 12 article or watch the discussion here:

Ultimately, a jury saw things the same way: On June 10, 2025 — eleven months later — Fletcher was acquitted on all counts.

Her attorney, Brandon Fox, released a statement on her behalf.

Akira is doing extremely well post-verdict. She feels as if the weight of the world has been lifted from her shoulders. Returning home to her son without the pressure of an aggravated murder indictment hanging over her head felt like a new beginning.

I’ll bet. I’m no expert and I wasn’t in the courtroom, but based on what I see, that seems like the right result.

But she could probably have saved herself a year of burden by having a little more common sense.

Sources

Fletcher’s original Facebook post is no longer available.

Local 12 did a good job with the timeline: the initial shooting, before anything much was known; Norton’s death; the social media posts; Fletcher’s arrest; and getting to the legal angle.

I won’t claim to have found every piece of news on this story: Treat these numbers as minima. Fox 19 had at least three articles. WLWT 5 had at least three as well. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s two articles are paywalled. WCPO 9 and The Wiz 101.1 also had articles.

Finally, there was coverage from across the pond by the Mirror and the Daily Mail.