Quinton Tellis: Not Guilty in Louisiana — and What It Means for the Jessica Chambers Case

Some names never leave the true-crime memory. Jessica Chambers — the 19-year-old found walking away from her burning car on a rural road in Courtland, Mississippi, on December 6, 2014, burned over nearly her whole body, alive long enough to speak to the firefighters who reached her — is one of them.

The man Mississippi twice tried for her death is Quinton Tellis. Two juries heard the case. Neither could agree. And on July 23, 2026, in a different state and a different killing entirely, a judge told Tellis he was free of a murder charge for the third time — this time not by deadlock, but by acquittal.

The Louisiana case: Ming-Chen "Mandy" Hsiao

While Mississippi was building its case over Chambers, Louisiana had its own: Ming-Chen "Mandy" Hsiao, a University of Louisiana Monroe graduate student from Taiwan, found dead in her Monroe apartment in the summer of 2015. She had been tortured and stabbed.

The state's theory was financial: prosecutors argued Tellis killed Hsiao in late July 2015 to get access to her banking information and drain money from her account. The defense's answer was simpler — that investigators never produced enough evidence to put Tellis inside that apartment or definitively tie him to the killing itself.

Tellis chose a bench trial — no jury, one judge — which began March 16, 2026, at the Ouachita Parish Courthouse. On July 23, Judge Larry Jefferson of the Fourth Judicial District Court delivered his verdict: not guilty.

One day later: a new charge

The courthouse doors barely closed. On July 24, 2026, Louisiana authorities charged Tellis with intimidating a witness — a fresh accusation, on which he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

And he isn't going home either way. Tellis was expected to be extradited to Mississippi to serve out the remainder of a burglary sentence, with a tentative release date of October 16, 2027.

The case that made the name: Jessica Chambers

To understand why this Louisiana verdict made national news, you have to go back to that road in Panola County.

Jessica Chambers was doused in accelerant and set on fire in her car on a December night in 2014. She walked toward the firefighters who found her. Eight first responders would later testify to what she said at the scene — some version of:

"Eric set me on fire."

No last name. Tellis's first name is Quinton. That dying statement became the spine of his defense across two capital murder trials:

• October 2017 — the jury deadlocked. Mistrial.
• Fall 2018 — after roughly ten hours of deliberation over two days, the second jury deadlocked too. Mistrial.

Prosecutors argued cell phone data placed Tellis with Chambers that evening and that her catastrophic injuries made her speech at the scene unreliable — that first responders may have heard something that wasn't a name at all. The defense argued the jury should take a dying young woman at her word. Twice, twelve people couldn't resolve it.

Because both trials ended in hung juries rather than acquittals, double jeopardy does not prevent Mississippi from trying him a third time. No retrial has been scheduled, and prosecutors have not publicly committed either way. Jessica Chambers' death remains, legally, an open question — nobody has ever been convicted of it.

Why this case file matters

The Tellis file is a rare three-act study in how differently the same defendant can fare against the same burden of proof: two hung juries in Mississippi, then a judge in Louisiana ruling the state simply hadn't carried its burden. An acquittal is not a finding of innocence — it is a finding that the evidence didn't reach beyond a reasonable doubt. If that distinction is fuzzy, our explainer on what "charged" vs. "convicted" actually means walks through it. And for whatever comes next in Mississippi, watch our court dates tracker.

Sources & records

• KNOE Monroe: not-guilty verdict in the Hsiao bench trial
• WJTV: new witness-intimidation charge after the acquittal
• Action News 5: acquittal and return to Mississippi
• NBC News: first responders' testimony on Jessica Chambers' last words
• CNN: the 2017 mistrial in the Chambers case

Case status as of this writing: acquitted July 23, 2026, in the killing of Ming-Chen Hsiao; charged July 24, 2026, with intimidating a witness, on which he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty; never convicted in the death of Jessica Chambers, with no third trial scheduled. This article is based on court proceedings and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: booking photo of Quinton Tellis (public record).