Davion Booze, 24, was a Black man who was shot to death on April 17, 2020, in south St. Louis, Missouri. In the middle of the afternoon, police were called to the 4900 block of Fyler Avenue, near the edge of the Tower Grove South area, where the first reports pointed to a shooting that had spilled into the street and left two people hit. When officers arrived, they found Booze and a woman suffering from gunshot wounds.
Booze had been shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene, while the woman was rushed to a hospital in critical condition.
Early accounts placed the violence at close range and around a vehicle, not a random shot from far off. Investigators worked a scene that sat in a lived-in neighborhood—porches, storefront traffic not far away, and the ordinary evidence of a spring day interrupted by gunfire. In the days that followed, police appealed for help from anyone who might have seen what happened or captured it on security cameras, because the answers were expected to be tied to a specific person, a specific car, and a narrow slice of time.
Years later, the case moved from an unsolved street mystery into a courtroom confession. Demond Ward, 41, pleaded guilty to charges of voluntary manslaughter, unlawful use of a weapon, armed criminal action, and first-degree assault. The most serious count was reduced from first-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter as part of the resolution.
According to the account presented with the plea, Ward admitted that he shot and killed Booze while Booze was inside a car on Fyler Avenue, and he also admitted to critically wounding Booze’s girlfriend in the same burst of violence. With that admission, the outline of what happened became clearer: this was not a stray bullet or a distant exchange, but a deliberate shooting aimed into a vehicle, leaving one victim dead where he sat and another fighting to survive.
A circuit judge, Calea Stovall-Reid, accepted Ward’s plea and said she would follow the terms of the plea agreement by sentencing him to 15 years in prison. The guilty plea and agreed sentence closed the criminal case with a conviction, replacing the uncertainty that followed the shooting with a final set of charges and a prison term tied directly to Booze’s death and the life-altering injuries to the woman who was with him.
