By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Monday, November 10, 2025LaToshia Daniels (L), Tabatha Archie (C) and her late husband, Pastor Brodes Perry. | YouTube/ COURT TV

LaToshia Daniels, the former social worker mistress of the late Pastor Brodes Perry of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee, was spared having to spend the rest of her life in prison last Friday after a jury found her not guilty of first-degree murder.

She will find out on Dec. 17 how much of the 15 to 60 years in prison she will have to serve for second-degree murder, which the jury found her guilty of on Friday for Perry's 2019 killing, The Commercial Appeal reported. She was also found guilty of reckless endangerment.

Daniels, 46, was on trial for first-degree murder and attempted murder in the April 4, 2019, shooting at the Perrys' apartment in Collierville, Tennessee. The late pastor's widow, Tabatha Archie, was also shot by Daniels during the 2019 attack at her apartment.

Archie testified in court that she was unaware that her late husband was in a relationship with Daniels, whom she met through a church in Little Rock, Arkansas, two years before the shooting. Perry was serving as pastor of assimilation at Saint Mark Baptist Church at the time.

In her testimony during the trial, Daniels testified that Perry seduced her during a counseling session at the Arkansas church, where she was being counseled through a divorce. She stated, however, that she never meant to kill him.

"I loved Brodes. I would never intentionally hurt him," Daniels said Thursday as she spoke in her defense on the third day of her trial in Shelby County, Tennessee, WATN-TV reported. 

The prosecution tried to convince the jury that Daniels premeditated the murder through testimony that she bought the gun she used in the attack hours before the murder. Daniels, who was a licensed social worker and owned The Root Behavioral Health, specializing in anger management, insisted that she bought the gun to end her own life.

A prosecutor reiterated in closing arguments that Daniels told Perry, "You broke my heart" when she shot him, according to Fox 13 Memphis.

"'You broke my heart,' so I'm gonna shoot you and kill you in your doorway, and along the way, shoot your wife. But it's OK, because 'you broke my heart.' Decision after decision after decision, ladies and gentlemen," prosecutor Irris Williams told the jury. "If a broken heart was an excuse or defense to murder, I wouldn't have a job."

Lauren Fuchs, Daniels' defense attorney, argued that the jury was not just deciding the fate of a suspect but also a victim.

"He [Brodes Perry] got to have this lifestyle where he was cheating on multiple women, and it was OK. It was OK that he, as a pastor, does those things. That's what these women gave him," Fuchs said. "Latoshia, she gave him whatever he wanted, and Tabatha was his wife. He took and took and took from these women, and the whole time, he was lying to all of them."

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