The man sentenced for killing Serena and Venus Williams‘ sister has been re-arrested just months after being released from prison.
Robert Edwards Maxfield was re-arrested Friday night in Compton, California after he allegedly violated his parole, Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials and jail records show, according to PEOPLE. While a spokesman with the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation would not confirm if the Robert Edwards Maxfield was the same Maxfield sentenced in the 2003 death of Yetunde Price, both men share the same age, name, and race.
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Maxfield had been released from prison earlier this year after serving more than a decade behind bars for the September 14, 2003 shooting death of Prince, the sister of Serena and Venus Williams.
Price, who was 31 and the mother of three children at the time of her death, was shot in the back of the head when Maxfield opened fire with an assault weapon on Price’s SUV as it traveled own East Greenleaf Boulevard near a suspected drug house. Prosecutors argued that the shooting was gang-related retaliation from Price, who was a member of the Southside Crips gang and who mistook Price as another gang member.
Price’s boyfriend, Rolland Wormley, had been driving the SUV at the time of the shooting, though he escaped unharmed.
“I’m trying to get through this. I’m trying to get away, I’m trying to get her to safety,” Wormley told the Times shortly after Price’s murder. “Once I get to Long Beach Boulevard, I see the back window is shattered. I look to the right and said, ‘Baby, are you all right?’ I look at [Price] and there was blood everywhere.”
In 2006, after two mistrials, Maxfield pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter, and in April of that year he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. According to state corrections officials, Maxfield was paroled in March of this year.
While both Serena and Venus Williams have hardly spoken about their sister’s murder, in 2016 along with their other siblings, they opened the Yetunde Price Resource Center, which supports individuals, families, and children in Southern Los Angeles affected by trauma.
“We definitely wanted to honor our sister’s memory because she was a great sister, she was our oldest sister and obviously she meant a lot to us,” Serena told The Root when the center was opened. “And it meant a lot to us, to myself and to Venus and my other sisters as well, Isha and Lyndrea, that we’ve been wanting to do something for years in memory of her, especially the way it happened, a violent crime.”
Maxfield will now likely go before a judge, where he has the possibility of having his parole revoked and being sent back to prison.
