The recording did not capture the entire night, leaving jurors to weigh its images against forensic findings, witness evidence and investigative gaps.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A motion-activated camera recorded only fragments of the night before Kara Akins was found dead, but the images became a crucial marker in a six-hour timeline that prosecutors used to establish what happened before Lawrence Goodine called 911 from her Chattanooga home.
The recording showed Goodine, a former Chattanooga police officer, pursuing Akins outside her Carr Street residence on Nov. 28, 2023, according to testimony and arguments at his August 2026 trial. Prosecutors said he grabbed her and pulled her back toward the home while she protested and pleaded with him. The camera did not record continuously, making its gaps a major defense issue. Jurors ultimately considered the footage with an autopsy, Goodine’s statements, physical evidence and testimony before convicting him of felony murder, aggravated kidnapping and several other offenses.
What the camera showed became the prosecution’s starting point rather than its entire case. Prosecutor Roger Layne said the video captured Goodine running across the street toward Akins before taking hold of her. Her words could be heard on the recording as she resisted, according to the trial report. The defense did not dispute that footage existed but warned jurors against assuming it documented everything that happened afterward. Because the system was triggered by motion, periods of activity could take place outside its view or between recordings.
Roughly six hours later, the timeline moved from a neighbor’s camera to Goodine’s own emergency call. He dialed 911 at 3:16 a.m. on Nov. 29. Officers responding to the home found Akins, 48, in the living room. Prosecutors said Goodine immediately and repeatedly told police that she had taken something. That claim gave investigators one possible explanation at the scene, but it would later become evidence for prosecutors, who argued that Goodine was trying to direct officers toward a drug-overdose theory before they had determined how Akins died.
The first police response became particularly important because officers did not immediately identify the residence as a homicide scene. Defense attorney Neal Pinkston said investigators initially reported finding no evidence of value and left. Police returned several days later with a search warrant and collected numerous items. Pinkston used the sequence to challenge the reliability of the eventual reconstruction. If investigators had not recognized a possible killing during their first visit, he argued, they could not know what evidence had disappeared or changed by the time they conducted a more extensive search.
The autopsy supplied evidence that did not depend on the surveillance recording. The Hamilton County medical examiner ruled Akins’ death a homicide caused by manual strangulation and blunt-force injury to the head. Evidence presented at trial included bruising and fractures in the neck and a head injury accompanied by bleeding around the brain. Prosecutors argued that those findings supported a violent cause of death and contradicted the overdose narrative they said Goodine repeatedly gave officers at the house.
The toxicology evidence was more contested. Pinkston told jurors that Akins had alcohol and cocaine in her system, seeking to show that the possibility of a drug-related death was not something Goodine simply invented. Prosecutor Paul Moyle responded during rebuttal that the cocaine indication resulted from a presumptive screening test and that follow-up testing did not confirm it. For jurors, the dispute required separating an initial laboratory screening result from the medical examiner’s formal conclusion about the injuries that caused Akins’ death.
Another evidentiary dispute involved what prosecutors said happened inside the living room before officers arrived. The state accused Goodine of washing blood from Akins’ face, moving her across the room, rearranging her arms and taking photographs of her. Prosecutors argued that those actions were part of an effort to change the scene’s appearance before the emergency call. The allegation did not rest on the neighbor’s exterior camera. Instead, it depended on other evidence and the prosecution’s interpretation of Goodine’s conduct during the hours that were not continuously recorded.
The defense answered those allegations by returning to evidence that investigators did not preserve. Pinkston highlighted a large rug on which Akins had been found, saying it was discarded and never tested. He also told jurors that DNA samples collected from Akins contained mixtures involving two or three people and said at least one contributor remained unidentified. The defense argued that those unanswered questions were especially significant because surveillance footage covered only portions of the night and because the initial police response had not secured the residence as a homicide scene.
Pinkston also argued that the surviving camera material might not represent all footage that once existed. He said testimony from the neighbor suggested additional recordings had been available. Whatever those recordings may have shown could no longer be determined from the evidence presented at trial. The prosecution did not need the camera to provide an uninterrupted film of the crime, however. It asked jurors to use the recording as one part of a larger body of circumstantial and forensic evidence connecting the confrontation outside to Akins’ condition hours later.
The legal significance of the outdoor encounter extended beyond the murder counts. Goodine and Akins were subject to no-contact orders involving each other after both had been arrested in connection with an earlier domestic violence incident. Prosecutors therefore used evidence that Goodine was at Akins’ home not only in presenting the homicide timeline but also to support the separate allegation that he violated a court order. The jury convicted him of that offense along with aggravated kidnapping, aggravated criminal trespass and evidence tampering.
Jurors deliberated for about six to seven hours after the five-day trial. Their decisions differed across the three murder counts. They convicted Goodine, 46, of first-degree felony murder in the perpetration of aggravated kidnapping while finding him guilty of the lesser offense of second-degree murder on two other counts that had been charged as first-degree murder. Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Barry Steelman imposed a life sentence on the felony-murder conviction immediately after the verdict.
The camera footage therefore became important without becoming the whole case. Prosecutors used it to establish a confrontation and Goodine’s presence with Akins, then relied on medical findings, testimony, his statements and allegations about the altered scene to account for later events. The defense tried to turn the camera’s gaps into a broader argument about uncertainty, saying the missing footage, untested rug, unidentified DNA and delayed evidence collection prevented the state from offering a complete reconstruction. Jurors ultimately concluded that the evidence met the burden of proof on the felony-murder charge and other counts.
Akins’ family had previously described her as a mother of seven who had lived in Chattanooga since she was 15. She also founded WOW Kids, an outreach program serving children living in the Emma Wheeler Homes community. Those facts received less attention during a trial focused on surveillance recordings, forensic results and disputed investigative decisions, but they formed part of the public record surrounding Akins beyond the final hours captured by cameras and police reports.
Goodine remains under the life sentence imposed for felony murder. Steelman scheduled an Oct. 22 status hearing involving sentencing on the remaining convictions. Pinkston said after the verdict that a possible appeal would be discussed with Goodine. As of Sept. 29, the later hearing had not occurred, and no subsequent ruling changing the felony-murder conviction or life sentence was identified in the sources reviewed.
Author note: Last updated September 29, 2026.