The property disagreement developed over months before Steven Williams Jr. and Norman Hollowell Jr. met at an Ocean View apartment.
NORFOLK, Va. — The television had been sitting in Norman Andrew Hollowell Jr.’s apartment for months after a former roommate moved away. By the time a Norfolk jury considered the case two years later, that abandoned property had become a key part of the prosecution’s account of why Hollowell was shot eight times and why Steven Edward Williams Jr. should be convicted of murder.
Jurors found Williams, 25, guilty June 18 of second-degree murder and using a firearm in the commission of murder in the death of Hollowell, 24. The verdict followed a trial in which an everyday property dispute provided the background to a far more consequential question: whether Williams went to Hollowell’s Pretty Lake Avenue apartment for an ordinary pickup that suddenly turned dangerous, as the defense contended, or arrived armed amid a confrontation he had reason to expect, as prosecutors argued. The jury rejected Williams’ claim that he fired in self-defense.
The story of the television began months before the shooting. Williams’ older brother had lived with Hollowell at the Ocean View apartment until February 2024. When he moved out, he left a large TV behind. Prosecutors said Hollowell held onto it for several months and asked Williams to come get it. The television remained there, and Hollowell eventually sold it through Facebook Marketplace in early July. The relationship among the men was not that of strangers: Hollowell had been close to Williams’ older brother, and prosecutors said Hollowell and Williams had known each other since childhood because of that friendship.
By July 21, the status of the television had taken on new significance. Norfolk investigators later recovered digital evidence showing Williams viewed Hollowell’s Facebook profile after the television had been sold. He then called Hollowell seven times through Facebook Messenger in about two hours, prosecutors said. Hollowell was not at home waiting for him. He was caring for a young nephew and working on grocery deliveries. Eventually, he answered and agreed to meet Williams at the apartment, setting up the encounter that would become the central event examined by jurors.
Hollowell returned to the complex with his nephew but did not take the child into the apartment. Prosecutors said he locked the boy in the car and sent his mother a brief message telling her he loved her before going upstairs. Williams, meanwhile, had already reached the apartment complex and was waiting outside while armed with a gun, according to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. That circumstance became important at trial because prosecutors used it to argue that the meeting was not as routine or spontaneous as Williams later described it.
Inside, Williams testified, he learned that the original television was no longer available. He said Hollowell instead offered him another television. Williams maintained that he had not known beforehand that the first TV had been sold and that he was simply attempting to collect property he expected to find at the apartment. He said he had arranged for a cousin with a truck to come help transport it. The cousin subsequently arrived accompanied by another person, creating another point of disagreement over what happened and why tensions rose.
According to Williams’ testimony, Hollowell became angry when he saw the two men approaching because they were strangers to him. Williams said the confrontation escalated inside the apartment and that Hollowell pulled a gun and pointed it at his face. Williams then fired, he testified, because he believed he faced an immediate threat. Hollowell was struck eight times. Prosecutors did not dispute that Hollowell had a gun on him when he died, but they said investigators found no evidence that he had fired it and no evidence beyond Williams’ account establishing that Hollowell pointed it at Williams.
The departure from the apartment gave prosecutors another way to describe the encounter. A doorbell camera recorded Williams’ cousin and the other individual leaving with a television, while Williams followed carrying a gun. Prosecutors said the two men had arrived only about two minutes before the shooting and that Hollowell was shot about 13 minutes after he and Williams first entered the apartment. Those time markers allowed the Commonwealth to argue that the dispute, the arrival of additional men, the fatal gunfire and the removal of a television were tightly connected events rather than unrelated developments.
The television was only one part of the proof presented to the jury. Investigators determined that every cartridge casing recovered from Hollowell’s apartment had been fired from Williams’ gun. Hollowell’s own firearm had not been discharged, according to prosecutors. Williams’ gun was not recovered at the scene because authorities said he later disposed of it. Months afterward, police found the weapon in Suffolk during an unrelated incident. That recovery gave investigators the evidence needed to link the gun back to the casings collected after Hollowell’s death.
Williams’ actions after leaving the apartment also entered the prosecution’s chronology. Authorities said he deactivated his Facebook account within hours. Police, meanwhile, responded to the home in the 2100 block of Pretty Lake Avenue around 7:20 p.m. and found Hollowell suffering from critical gunshot injuries. He was pronounced dead there. The Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office later said Hollowell died from blood loss in his living room. Detectives obtained warrants for Williams on charges of second-degree murder and use of a firearm, but he was not taken into custody that night.
Norfolk police arrested Williams on Aug. 13, 2024, roughly three weeks after the killing. At the time, police released only basic information: Hollowell had been found fatally shot, Williams was wanted in connection with the homicide, and investigators had charged him with murder and a firearm offense. The fuller history of the television, the Messenger calls, the social-media evidence, the doorbell video and Williams’ self-defense account became public through the later prosecution. Those details turned an initial homicide report into a case about competing interpretations of why Williams entered the apartment armed and what happened before he opened fire.
The official timeline is also significant because some secondary reports later misstated the date of Hollowell’s death. Norfolk police identified Hollowell in a July 22, 2024, notice and said the shooting happened the previous evening, July 21. The department’s Aug. 14 arrest announcement used the same date, as did the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s September 2026 account of the trial. Those primary records place the shooting on July 21 rather than July 24, the date appearing in the Law&Crime report that brought renewed attention to the conviction.
The jury heard evidence and arguments from June 16 through June 18, 2026. After deliberating for nearly three hours, jurors rejected the claim of self-defense and returned guilty verdicts on both charges. Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi said afterward that his office believed the evidence established Williams was not lawfully defending himself. He also emphasized the long connection between the men, noting that Williams had taken the life of someone he had known since childhood. Prosecutors said they intend to seek a prison term reflecting the harm caused by the killing.
For now, Judge Robert L. Foley is scheduled to sentence Williams on Dec. 18. Until that hearing, the punishment remains unresolved, but the central legal question presented at trial has been decided: the jury found that the confrontation over the television ended in second-degree murder, not a justified act of self-defense.
Author note: Last updated October 20, 2026.