Man Sentenced to 32 Years for First-Degree Murder After Shooting Friend in 2022
NORFOLK, Va. – Marco Jaime Hicks, 32, was sentenced on Friday to 32 years in prison after pleading guilty to the first-degree murder of his friend, 27-year-old Michael Isaac Rivera-Rubert, by shooting him in his head in 2022.
Mr. Hicks, Mr. Rivera-Rubert, and several friends went to a nightclub the night of Sept. 3, 2022, parking their vehicles at an overflow parking lot in a strip mall in the 800 block of North Military Highway. By about 2 a.m. on Sept. 4, the group returned to the strip mall parking lot. Surveillance video of the parking lot showed the friends chatting with one another, apparently uneventfully, for about 20 minutes before Mr. Hicks walked across the lot to his vehicle, got a pistol, walked back up to Mr. Rivera-Rubert, put the pistol nearly to Mr. Rivera-Rubert’s head, and shot him once, killing him almost instantly.
After Mr. Hicks shot and killed Mr. Rivera-Rubert, Mr. Hicks and the other individuals fled the scene in two vehicles. A good Samaritan who heard the gunshot from inside one of the strip mall businesses came out and tried to help Mr. Rivera-Rubert, but there was nothing he could do. Norfolk Police arrived at the scene soon afterward and found Mr. Rivera-Rubert dead.
The subsequent investigation yielded videos from the strip mall and from a number of other local businesses depicting that evening. The footage showed Mr. Hicks wearing the same clothing and bearing a distinctive tattoo of a rifle running vertically from the right side of his forehead down his cheek. Norfolk Police arrested Mr. Hicks, who identified himself in some of the video but falsely claimed that another individual in the group shot and killed Mr. Rivera-Rubert.
On Dec. 4, 2023, Mr. Hicks pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. Judge Joseph C. Lindsey accepted Mr. Hicks’s plea with an agreed maximum sentence of 35 years. On Friday, Judge Lindsey sentenced Mr. Hicks to serve 32 years of a 50-year prison sentence, with the suspended time conditioned upon Mr. Hicks’ uniform good behavior while incarcerated and completion of three years of supervised probation.
“The act of murder is serious, and it is permanent,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi. “Mr. Hicks took the victim away from his family forever. While this sentence does not bring back the victim, it holds Mr. Hicks accountable for the harm he has caused. My thoughts are with the victim and his family as they move forward.”
Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Emily A. Woodley prosecuted Mr. Hicks’s case on behalf of the Commonwealth, and Norfolk Police Detectives Peter G. Kolb and Kyle D. Austin led the investigation.
###