Part 1: The Laughter

There’s a specific kind of arrogance that belongs only to the young, a chilling, hollow confidence that believes consequences are for other people.

It’s the smirk of a teenager who thinks he’s smarter than the system. It’s the laugh of a 20-year-old who believes his own cruelty makes him a star.

But in a packed courtroom, under the unblinking eye of justice, that arrogance is a brittle thing. It’s a mask that cracks under pressure.

And when it breaks, the chaos that follows is a thing to behold.

This is not a story about “troubled youth.” This is a story about monsters. It’s a tale of two courtrooms, two victims, and two faces of evil that thought their youth was a shield.

They were wrong.

It began on a sticky summer night in Albany, New York. July 25th, 2020. Essex Street was alive with the sounds of a city trying to breathe, the air thick with humidity and tension. A petty dispute, the kind that flares up from a hard look or a single, stupid word, was all it took.

For 17-year-old Alvin Foy, that dispute was a death sentence. Not for him, but for whoever was in his way.

He and his accomplice, Jair Manning, didn’t just respond with fists. They responded with a hailstorm. Thirty-one shots. Thirty-one bullets fired from a car into a crowd of people. It wasn’t a fight; it was an execution.

The intended target, a young man, was hit in the shoulder. He would live.

But bullets don’t care about intentions. They are chaos agents, and they find the innocent.

Eighteen-year-old China Forny was in that crowd. She was a high school senior, just three weeks away from walking the graduation stage. She was, by all accounts, a light—a girl with a future, a family, a life. She was standing with friends, laughing.

She never even saw Foy. She never saw the gun.

She just felt a searing, unbelievable pain in her back. A stray bullet, one of 31, found her. She collapsed, not onto the pavement, but into the arms of her friend, her life stolen in a single, brutal second.

Alvin Foy, who knew China, who had been in her company, didn’t stop. He didn’t render aid. He didn’t call for help.

He fled. The getaway car, captured on surveillance, tore through the night, leaving a city in shock and a family destroyed.

The police found him. Ballistics, witnesses, and the car itself linked him to the trigger. He was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, attempted murder, and a slew of weapons offenses.

And through it all, he smirked.

In hearings, in grainy footage, he slouched and smiled, radiating a cold, untouchable arrogance. He was 17. What could they really do to him? He was confident. He was a kid. He was invincible.

In 2022, his trial began in Albany County Court. The mask was still firmly in place.

The prosecution was a grim, methodical affair. Surveillance footage played in silence. Ballistics charts were pointed to with wooden dowels. Witnesses, their voices trembling, recounted the chaos of that night.

Foy’s “not guilty” plea felt like a joke. The jury didn’t laugh. They came back with a guilty verdict.

But the real trial, the real moment of reckoning, came at his sentencing.

The courtroom was packed. It was hot. The air thrummed with a collective, silent grief, a heavy blanket of sorrow for a girl who should have been picking out college classes. China’s family, a row of broken hearts, sat in the front.

And then he entered.

Alvin Foy, in his prison jumpsuit, didn’t walk. He sauntered. He slouched into his chair at the defense table, his long limbs splayed out as if he were waiting for a bus, not facing a lifetime in prison.

The smirk was there.

The victim impact statements began.

China Forny’s sister, a young woman whose face was a mirror of the girl they had lost, walked to the podium. She placed her trembling hands on the wood. She took a deep, shuddering breath and looked, for the first time, directly at the boy who had murdered her sister.

“China was…” her voice cracked. She stopped. She looked at the judge, who nodded, giving her time.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice gaining a thread of steel.

“China was just three weeks away from the stage. She was going to graduate high school.”

She turned her gaze back to Foy.

“You took that from her. You took that from us. You… you came with us. You ate at our table. You were out with us multiple times.” Her voice was rising, a symphony of disbelief and pure, undiluted pain.

“How… how could you? I expected so much more than that from you.”

And then, it happened.

As her voice broke, as she wept for the sister he had gunned down, Alvin Foy did the single most unforgivable thing he could do.

He smiled.

It wasn’t a small smirk. It was a full-toothed, active, mocking smile. The gallery saw it. The family saw it. The judge saw it.

China’s sister, seeing his face, completely broke down, her grief turning into a rage she couldn’t contain.

And Alvin Foy laughed.

It was a soft sound at first. A huff. A chuckle. He laughed at her pain. He laughed at her tears. He laughed at the memory of the girl he had killed.

The courtroom exploded.

A wave of pure, unfiltered fury ripped through the gallery.

“He’s laughing!” someone screamed.

“He’s LAUGHING!”

The judge’s gavel hammered down, the sound like a gunshot in the tense room.

“ORDER!”

Judge Roger Macdonald, his face a mask of cold fury, stared at Foy.

“Anyone with a shred of human decency would not laugh,” he seethed.

But Foy, emboldened by the chaos, just slouched deeper, his arrogance now in full bloom.

The judge, his patience gone, gave Foy a chance to speak. It was a mistake.

“You want to address the court, Mr. Foy?”

Foy’s defiance was instant.

“Yeah. Six other witnesses said I wasn’t there! We have two females said I wasn’t there! I was on a FaceTime call!”

“Sir, we are not trying the case,” the judge said, his voice dropping to a dangerous low.

“The case has been tried. The jury was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“You can’t talk at the same time as I talk,” the judge warned, as Foy tried to interrupt, “because the stenographer is going to take down my words. If you want your words recorded, you can’t try to talk over me. The jury has already decided that issue, sir. Anything else you want to say to the court, sir?”

“Yeah,” Foy sneered.

“I can’t wait to be able to see my face on TV.”

The judge’s head snapped up.

“Is that why you were laughing throughout the statement by the… is that why you were laughing, sir?”

“She was laughing at me!” Foy, the killer, now claimed to be the victim.

“You’ve said that already,” the judge said, his patience evaporated.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah…” Foy started, but his own lawyer, seeing the trainwreck, tried to stop him.

The judge had seen enough.

“The defendant stands before this court professing his innocence,” he began, his voice booming.

“And regardless of whether you admit to brutally murdering her, you wouldn’t sit at sentencing and laugh about it. That’s…”

“BULL—!” Foy roared, the word echoing off the walls.

That was the last straw.

Foy didn’t just yell. He lunged. He lunged at the deputies, at the table, at the system he thought he could mock.

Chaos erupted.

It was an all-out brawl. Deputies swarmed the defense table, tackling Foy, who was thrashing and screaming. He was a whirlwind of rage and defiance. The courtroom was a sea of blue uniforms, a mass of bodies.

“Take him back!” the judge roared over the din.

As they dragged the 250-pound teenager, kicking and screaming, from the courtroom, a final, humiliating detail was captured by the cameras: his pants, which had been sagging, fell down. Deputies had to pull them up as they hauled his exposed, thrashing body through the door.

He was gone.

The courtroom, now silent and stunned, was left with an empty defense chair.

Judge Macdonald, his face still grim, proceeded. Alvin Foy was sentenced in absentia. His family, no longer smirking, sobbed as the gavel fell.

Twenty-five years to life.

The smirk was gone. The laughter was over. The chaos he had sown, he had finally, and fully, reaped. His family’s sobs were the only sound as the last echo of the gavel faded.

But Foy’s chilling arrogance, his laugh in the face of a sister’s grief, was not an isolated incident. Across the country, in another courtroom, another young man believed his own horrific crimes would make him a star.

Part 2: The Celebrity

His name was Antoine Pettis, and he was 20 years old. His crime, in Milwaukee, was a different kind of nightmare—not a chaotic, public explosion of gunfire, but a quiet, insidious, and deeply personal violation.

His victim was not a peer. She was a 101-year-old woman.

On September 1, 2013, Pettis broke into a home. It was a home that had stood for generations. It was the home of a woman who had seen the world change, who had lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and the birth of the internet. It was her sanctuary. It was the only home she had known for 60 years.

Pettis broke in to rob her. He was looking for cash, for jewels, for anything he could turn into quick money.

He found nothing.

The rage of that failure, the frustration of his own pathetic crime, needed an outlet. And she was the only one there.

He didn’t just rob her. He didn’t just leave.

He beat her. And then, in an act of depravity that made even veteran police officers cringe, he brutally assaulted the 101-year-old woman.

He left her, shattered, in the ruins of her own life.

The physical wounds were horrific. But the psychological trauma was a bomb. This woman, who had lived with strength and independence for over a century, was so completely terrorized that she could never return to her home.

The home she had lived in for 60 years was now a haunted house, a crime scene. Her independence, shattered in minutes by a 20-year-old predator, was gone forever. She was forced to flee, to spend the last chapter of her life in an assisted living facility, haunted by a fear she had never known.

Police found Pettis. DNA from the scene was matched to a relative’s profile, which led them straight to him. He confessed.

He was charged with first-degree sexual assault, battery, and burglary.

And when he walked into court, he wasn’t ashamed. He wasn’t remorseful. He was gleeful.

As reporters and cameras swarmed the hallway, Antoine Pettis, the man who had brutalized a 101-year-old woman, smiled. He mugged for the cameras. He posed. He preened.

And then he said the words that defined his monstrosity, the words that echoed Alvin Foy’s own diseased need for fame.

“Now,” he boasted to the reporters, “you all are about to make me a celebrity.”

He saw the flashing lights not as the harbingers of justice, but as a red carpet. He believed this act, this horrific, soul-crushing act of violence, was his ticket.

His trial, in 2013, was a sickening affair. The prosecution detailed the DNA evidence, the confession. But the defense… the defense tried to claim remorse.

It rang hollow. The entire city had seen the video. They had heard his boast. They knew his face. They remembered the smirk.

The jury rejected his empty pleas. They found him guilty.

At his sentencing, just as in Albany, the victim’s family spoke. They didn’t speak of a life cut short, but of a life desecrated. They spoke of their 101-year-old matriarch, a woman of strength, now reduced to a state of constant fear. They spoke of a woman who “could not go to sleep” and “was afraid at all times.”

They spoke of her shattered life, forced from the home she loved, her 60 years of memories now tainted by his violence. Their words carried the weight of her 101 years, a life of dignity that he had tried to erase in a single, monstrous act.

And then, Antoine Pettis, the “celebrity,” stood to speak.

His voice was steady. He offered an apology that was as thin as paper.

“I want to say that I apologize for making this big mistake,” he said.

A “big mistake.”

The courtroom, which had listened to the testimony of her trauma, saw a predator, not a penitent. The looming shadow of justice was all that remained.

On November 20, 2014, Judge Timothy Witkak delivered that justice.

“So, this is an especially serious crime,” the judge’s voice was cold, precise.

“Especially serious crime against a person who is a complete stranger. The community’s interest in this case is very high. I think we all hope that every citizen can be safe and secure in their own home.”

He spoke of the “horrific type of home invasion” and the victim’s trauma, her inability to sleep, her constant fear.

And then he delivered the sentence.

Thirty years in prison. Plus fifteen more years of extended supervision.

He ordered that Pettis register as a sex offender.

And in a final, fitting act of justice, he ordered Pettis to pay restitution. He had to pay for the victim’s moving costs. The cost of her having to flee her own life.

As the gavel fell, the cameras were still rolling. But Antoine Pettis was no longer smiling.

His “celebrity” dreams were crushed. The smirk that had enraged a city, the boast that had sealed his fate, all of it vanished. The reality of 30 years—three decades—in a cell, slammed into him. His fame was not celebrity. It was infamy.

China Forny, 18, left a grieving sister and a community in Albany that would never forget her. Alvin Foy, now 25, sits in Great Meadow Correctional Facility. He is eligible for parole in 2046.

Pettis’s victim lost her home, her independence, and her peace. Her trauma became a rallying cry in Milwaukee against home invasions. Antoine Pettis, now 32, sits in Green Bay Correctional Institution. He is eligible for parole in 2044.

Two young men, Alvin Foy and Antoine Pettis, thought their laughter and their boasts would outrun justice. They thought their youth was a shield. They thought their victims’ pain was a joke.

But in a courtroom, the only thing that matters is the truth. A teen’s murder and an elderly woman’s terror brought the gavel’s wrath. From the streets of Albany to a quiet home in Milwaukee, their stories are a grim reminder.

The smirk always fades. The laughter always stops.

The only sound that lasts is the thunder of the gavel.