HAMPTON — Cory Jamar Bigsby was sentenced Tuesday to the maximum 45-year sentence in the slaying of his 3-year-old son Codi nearly three years ago.
A Hampton Circuit Court judge sentenced the 45-year-old Bigsby to 40 years for second-degree murder and five years for concealing Codi’s body — the charges the jury convicted him on in March.
Bigsby called police on the morning of Jan. 31, 2022, to say that Codi — who by then would have been 4 — was missing from his family’s home in the city’s Buckroe Beach section. He said the boy was last seen in his bed at 2 a.m. and was nowhere to be found later that morning.
Codi has never been found.
But during a March jury trial that went seven days, prosecutors contended that Bigsby killed Codi seven months earlier — on June 18, 2021, when the boy was still 3 — and that Bigsby buried his body in Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside of Washington.
Jurors took less than two hours to convict him. And on Tuesday, Hampton’s top prosecutor, Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell, urged Judge James Hawks to sentence Bigsby to the maximum term.
“A person who should have been a protector became a predator,” Bell told the judge. “If the commonwealth could ask for life, we would. He deserves every second, every minute, every day of that 45 years.”
Bell also responded to statements from Bigsby’s aunt that he was a churchgoer growing up. “My Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill,'” said Bell, who is an ordained minister in addition to being Hampton’s elected top prosecutor.
Bigsby’s lawyer, Curtis Brown, asked for a sentence within discretionary state sentencing guidelines, which recommended between 13 and 22 years to serve.
“Fairness and justice, that’s all we ask,” Brown said. “Nobody saw my client put any hands on Codi.”
But Hawks — a retired Portsmouth judge presiding over the case — sided with Bell, doubling the guidelines.
“He killed this child with his own hands,” Hawks said, adding that Bigsby didn’t try to get Codi medical help and instead “attempted to avoid the consequences of his actions.”
Codi’s mother, Dina Abdul Kareem, was the only prosecution witness at Tuesday’s sentencing hearing.
Kareem, 43, testified that Bigsby “initially had me fooled” — leading her others to believe that he cared about them. But in fact, she said, “he was a sociopath disguised as a caring father.”
During the trial in March Kareem testified that after Bigsby took custody of the boy and three of his brothers in 2020, he wouldn’t return her calls and messages, but later emailed her about suspicions that the 2-year-old Codi was fondling his younger brothers.
“I do not want to severely hurt him to protect my babies,” Bigsby wrote to Kareem in April 2021. And when Bigsby reported Codi missing nine months later, Kareem immediately suspected Bigsby.
“The person who is supposed to love him is the last person he saw,” Kareem testified Tuesday. “I can only pray that Codi haunts him for eternity.”
She said the couple’s other children — an 8-year-old and 5-year-old twins — miss their brother and “talk about him all the time,” with one of the boys often asking if “Baby Codi” is in heaven.
“Everyone just misses him,” Kareem said. “The fact that he’s not around is depressing.”
“I’m still suffering, every day and every night,” she added. “It’s something I’ll never get over.”
Then Kareem turned to face the judge: “I respectfully request the maximum punishment,” she said. “He never deserves to see the light of day ever again.”
Bigsby’s sister — Tandaleyia Butler — was one of two witnesses for the defense on Tuesday. “Cory has always been a mild-mannered person, even as a kid,” she said.
Butler said Bigsby joined the Army at 18 and served 20 years, attaining the rank of sergeant first class. He saw time in combat, she said, with assignments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Kosovo and Germany. “That’s not the Cory that I know,” she said of the charges he faced.
Bigsby’s aunt, Jeanette Hinnant of Maryland, testified that she helped raise Bigsby in Maryland. “The Cory I know is a kind young man,” she said. “Gentle, kind, a guy of integrity … and very family-oriented.”
When he was a boy, she took him to church upwards of three times a week. When she learned of the charges against Bigsby in 2022, she said she was similarly shocked. “It was not the Cory that I know, that I helped raise,” Hinnant said.
Bigsby opted not to give a statement before Hawks sentenced him.
A group of citizens that has spent time looking for Codi was elated with the maximum term. “Thank you, Jesus!” one of them, Nancy Strickland, said in a courtroom hallway after the sentencing, putting both arms in the air.
“Justice has been served for Codi,” Kareem said through tears at a news conference in the commonwealth’s attorney’s office later.
Codi’s older brother, now 8, was the prosecution’s star witness at the March trial.
The boy testified that he found Codi lying on a bed on his side, with his eyes wide open and his face bruised purple.
The boy said he tried several times to shake Codi to wake him up. He went downstairs to tell his father, he said, but his father said “there was nothing wrong with Codi,” the boy testified.
Prosecutors contended the boy was dead when the brother encountered him.
Prosecutors also introduced a series of statements that Bigsby made at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail after police locked him up on on a series of child neglect charges.
In the first three statements — made in August and December 2022 — Bigsby talked about how he found Codi unresponsive, tried to revive him and then buried him when that wasn’t successful. But in the fourth statement, in December 2022, Bigsby wrote that he killed Codi.
“On June 18, 2021, I, Cory Bigsby, walked in the room and grabbed Codi and drag him into the kitchen,” says the two-page statement. Then, Bigsby wrote, he “thumped (Codi’s) head on the floor and beat him with my fist and he went into cardiac arrest.”
“I held him and prayed to God that he bring my baby back,” the written statement said. “Then I took him in the room and layed (sic) him on the bed.” Later, he put him in a car and drove him “to Building 5511” and “dug a hole by the tree and buried him, and then went home and prayed for forgiveness.”
“Please except (sic) my confession!” Bigsby wrote. “Sincerely, Cory Bigsby.”
One of Bigsby’s attorneys, Amina Matheny-Willard, told Hawks after Tuesday’s sentencing that Bigsby would appeal the verdict.
Bigsby still faces a host of child neglect and child abuse charges stemming from statements he made to police about the father’s care for his other children, with many counts pertaining to leaving the children unattended.
Bell said that case would go forward — “and I will be going for the maximum.” The prosecutor said he’s “hard core” against Bigsby because the case has been so traumatic for Hampton and the entire “757” community.
Everyone was asking ‘Where’s Codi?” and people still want an answer, he said.
“The harm to the community has been exacerbated by the fact that we just don’t know where he is,” Bell said of Codi. “There’s only one individual that knows that … And that is why we’re not going to spare one ounce of mercy for him.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
