Where Is Anjuan Carter Now? The Boy Who Voted No in the Brice Rhodes Case

The vote happened in a house in Louisville on May 22, 2016. Two teenage brothers — Maurice "Reece" Gordon, 16, and Larry Ordway, 14 — were confined in a bathroom while, outside the door, a man named Brice Rhodes put a question to a room full of boys: should the brothers die?

Anjuan Carter was 15 years old. By his own sworn testimony, he was the only one who voted no.

It didn't matter. A sock went into Gordon's mouth. His hands were tied behind his back, his head was covered, and he was beaten and stabbed to death. His little brother was killed the same way. And Carter — the boy who voted no — picked up a knife and helped, because, he later testified, he believed he'd be next if he didn't.

Ten years on, people search two questions about this case: what happened to the man who called the vote, and what happened to the boy who lost it. The first answer is final. The second is still being written — and it took another turn in a Louisville courtroom just months ago.

The wrong man, and the witnesses

The killings began with a mistake. On May 4, 2016, Rhodes — a Louisville rapper — shot Christopher Jones to death, believing, wrongly, that Jones had put a bounty on his head. Per Carter's testimony, Rhodes had promised payment to him and to the two brothers for their roles in the plot; the money never came, and the man they'd helped kill turned out to be the wrong target.

That made the brothers a problem. They weren't just teenagers in Rhodes' orbit anymore — they were witnesses to a murder. Eighteen days after Jones died, so did they. Their bodies were loaded into containers, dumped at an abandoned house on River Park Drive near Shawnee Park, and burned.

Carter's role continued after the killings: he testified that he helped clean the scene with bleach, took Gordon's shoes and phone — and called the brothers' mother, telling her that her sons just weren't available.

That mother, Elizabeth Marie Wren, had known Carter for years. At his sentencing she said she had loved him "with all my heart like my son" — and never imagined he would betray hers. At an early court hearing for Rhodes, she lunged at him across the courtroom.

The plea: 10 years, a headstone, and a second chance

Carter was charged as a juvenile and made his deal fast: in November 2016, at 15, he pleaded guilty to three counts of criminal facilitation to murder and one count of tampering with physical evidence, in exchange for his testimony against Rhodes. The sentence: 10 years in juvenile detention.

Kentucky's system, though, forces a decision when a juvenile inmate turns 18 — and in December 2018, Judge Charles Cunningham denied Carter probation and ordered him to adult prison, telling him he had helped snuff out three lives. Carter's answer in court: "I'm sorry for the events that occurred and I've taken steps to better myself."

Seven months later, the same judge reconsidered. In July 2019, Carter was released — with conditions, one of which belongs in the case-file hall of fame: he was ordered to pay for a headstone for Larry Ordway and Maurice Gordon, the brothers he helped kill. Fearing retaliation in Louisville, he planned to move to Florida with family.

The circus: seven years of Brice Rhodes vs. the courtroom

While Carter served his time, Rhodes turned his own case into one of the longest-running courtroom spectacles in the country. Across seven years of pretrial hearings he spat on his own attorney — after which he appeared in court masked — threatened judges, accused one judge of having an affair with the prosecutor, asked another if he was in the Ku Klux Klan, and denounced his appointed lawyers as racists. By the time trial finally arrived in December 2023, Judge Annie O'Connell Kaelin laid out the ground rules in advance: disrupt the proceedings and choose between removal — or a "stun cuff."

Court TV carried the trial as KY v. Brice Rhodes: The Witness to Murder Trial, and its centerpiece was the boy from the bathroom vote, now a grown man: Anjuan Carter took the stand and named Rhodes the instigator and mastermind of all three killings — the Jones shooting, the vote, the sock, the knives, the fire. The defense went at his credibility hard, and landed real hits: Carter admitted he had initially lied to police about knowing Rhodes and about his own role. Asked whether he had told police the truth, his answer was one word: "sometimes."

The jury believed the record. On December 18, 2023, Rhodes was convicted of all three murders, plus tampering with physical evidence and two counts of abuse of a corpse. In March 2024 he received three life sentences without the possibility of parole.

And on February 19, 2026, the last door closed: the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the sentences, rejecting an appeal built on claims of intellectual disability and mental illness. Kentucky's attorney general summed up the ruling in a sentence: "accountability does not expire."

So — where is Anjuan Carter now?

Not where his 2019 second chance was supposed to lead. By the time he testified against Rhodes in December 2023, Carter was already incarcerated in Florida on a burglary charge, and court records say he had violated his Kentucky probation back in 2022. After finishing the Florida sentence, he was brought back to Louisville — and on May 4, 2026, he stood before a judge on the lingering probation violation. His attorney asked for home incarceration. The judge said no, and set the violation for a further hearing.

That is where the public record currently ends: the boy who voted no, now in his mid-twenties, back in custody in the county where it all happened, waiting on a judge's decision about the last unfinished piece of a ten-year-old case. If the violation is resolved publicly, this file will be updated.

There's a courtroom throughline here worth naming. Carter's cross-examination — the early lies to police, the "sometimes" — is a textbook example of why police interrogations produce the evidence they produce, and why cooperator testimony almost never stands alone: it stood up because the physical record stood behind it.

Why this case file matters

Every murder-for-hire and group-killing prosecution eventually runs through someone like Anjuan Carter — the participant young enough, scared enough, or peripheral enough to trade testimony for a future. His deal worked exactly as designed: it buried Brice Rhodes under three life sentences that survived every appeal. What it couldn't do was guarantee what came after for the witness himself. The two searches people run about this case — what happened to Rhodes and where is Carter now — are really one question: what the justice system can finish, and what it can only start.

Case status as of this writing: Brice Rhodes was convicted of three counts of murder in December 2023, sentenced to three terms of life without parole in March 2024, and the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed in February 2026. Anjuan Carter pleaded guilty in 2016 to three counts of criminal facilitation to murder and tampering with physical evidence; as of the most recent public reporting (May 2026), he was in custody in Louisville awaiting a probation-violation hearing, the outcome of which has not been publicly reported. This article is based on court proceedings, trial testimony, and contemporaneous reporting by WDRB, WAVE 3, WHAS11, Law&Crime, Court TV, and CBS News. Featured image: AI illustration of a Louisville courtroom created for this article; it does not depict real persons or the actual courtroom.