The conviction of Zakeem F. Jones resolved the gunman’s trial, but prosecutors still have unfinished business in the separate case against Markeisha R. Burns-Cross.
SAGINAW, Mich. — Zakeem F. Jones has been sentenced to life without parole for killing Devon Williams in a Buena Vista Township home, yet the prosecution surrounding the 2023 shooting is still moving because Jones’ then-fiancee remains charged in the same homicide.
The split posture of the case now shapes its significance. Jones’ guilt has been decided by a jury and confirmed by a life sentence, but the state’s larger account of how the killing came together may still be tested in future proceedings involving Markeisha R. Burns-Cross. That means the public record is partly settled and partly open: settled on who fired the fatal shots, less settled on how the meeting with Williams was arranged and how much criminal responsibility prosecutors will ultimately prove against the second defendant.
Burns-Cross has been central from the beginning. Police and prosecutors have said she previously had a relationship with Williams and that the two shared a child. In July 2023, months after the shooting, local reporting said she was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and other offenses. Authorities said at the time that Williams’ death had been planned with another suspect who was then incarcerated in another state. That other suspect was Jones. The fact that Burns-Cross later testified for the prosecution against Jones, reportedly without a plea agreement in place, gave the case an unusual shape. She was not only a witness to the shooting and the events leading up to it, but a defendant whose own legal exposure remained unresolved.
According to public accounts of the trial, Burns-Cross told jurors that she and Jones had argued while drinking in Bay City on March 29, 2023, and that she began texting Williams afterward. Prosecutors said Jones found those messages, became angry and ordered her to keep communicating with Williams. The pair then drove to the duplex on Walters Drive in Buena Vista Township, where Williams was babysitting children. Prosecutors said Jones first tried to get Williams to come outside, then entered the residence with a 9 mm handgun when that failed. Burns-Cross testified she heard repeated shots and felt heat pass in front of her face. Williams, 33, was found wounded and later died at a hospital. Investigators recovered shell casings and bullet fragments from the home.
Jones’ own case moved more slowly than Burns-Cross’s. Williams was killed March 30, 2023. Burns-Cross was charged that summer. Jones was not arrested until September 2024, when authorities took him into custody as he was being released from prison in Illinois on an unrelated case and then extradited him to Michigan. His trial did not begin until January 2026. Jurors convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder and multiple firearm counts. On March 25, 2026, Judge Andre R. Borrello sentenced him to life without parole, added three consecutive two-year firearm terms and imposed a $1,218 fine. Jones told the court, “I’m cool, man. It is what it is,” a remark that Williams’ family treated as proof of indifference rather than acceptance.
What remains unclear in public view is how Burns-Cross’s case will be resolved and whether it will produce more detail than Jones’ trial summaries already have. Earlier reporting said she was scheduled for an April 15, 2026, settlement conference. The public search results reviewed here do not clearly confirm what happened afterward, so it is not possible to say from the available open reporting whether a plea was discussed, rejected or postponed. That unresolved status matters because a second prosecution can do more than repeat a first one. It can expose differences in testimony, reveal additional records or narrow the state’s theory about who planned what and when.
The Williams family’s statements show why that remaining process matters even after a life sentence. Williams’ mother, Shontele Lockett, urged the court to give Jones the longest sentence available, saying he showed no remorse and had chosen to kill a man he did not know. Public reaction in the courtroom was strong enough that applause broke out after the sentence before the judge restored order. Those moments reflected relief over the sentence, but they also hinted at why one conviction may not feel like a full ending. Williams was killed in a home where children were present, and the prosecution has long treated the shooting as something larger than a one-man act of rage.
So the case now stands in two places at once. For Jones, the punishment is fixed at the trial court level: life without parole. For Burns-Cross, the next courtroom step remains the unfinished part of the story, and it may determine whether the public’s last view of this homicide is a closed file or a still-unfolding prosecution.
Author note: Last updated April 17, 2026.