Dale Frank Lee Davis, Jr., a 20-year-old man from the Waynesville–St. Robert area, died on June 19, 2016, in St. Robert, Missouri. People close to him remembered an easygoing young guy who worked at Subway and seemed to collect friends everywhere he went, the kind of person who didn’t treat anyone like a stranger.
Just after 3 a.m. that Sunday, deputies were called to the 21000 block of Laramie Road in rural Pulaski County, where gunfire had erupted inside a home.
Dale was shot and killed in the incident, and another young man, Isaiah Anderson, was also hit—wounded in the legs—and survived. Investigators said several other people were inside the home at the time, but no one else was physically hurt.
In the first wave of reporting, law enforcement described a fast-moving scene with suspects already gone before deputies arrived. The sheriff’s office believed at least two suspects were involved, and multiple people of interest had been identified as detectives tried to piece together who came to that house in the dark and why. Investigators also looked at another violent episode that had happened roughly 30 minutes earlier—shots fired into a home in St. Robert—because authorities said the two incidents might be connected. The Lake of the Ozarks Major Case Squad was brought in to help, along with investigators from the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Division of Drugs and Crime Control.
As the community tried to process what happened, Dale’s grandmother, Arlene Ghumm, spoke publicly about the shock of losing him and the ache of not having answers. The sheriff said detectives had more than one possible motive but weren’t releasing details, adding that they believed the suspect or suspects likely knew the victims and that there was “no need for public alarm,” describing it as an isolated incident even as the search continued.
Days later, authorities announced arrests that were described as tied to the deadly shooting through the surviving victim’s family. Four men—Demorae Turner, Keyago Stewart, Gregory Horton, and Jordan Principato—were taken into custody in connection with several home-invasion robberies and a beating of Albert Anderson, Isaiah Anderson’s father. Investigators said one home invasion happened in the 14200 block of Host Drive in May and another in the 22600 block of Hector Drive in June, with allegations that Anderson was hit, kicked, and beaten with weapons, and that other people were threatened with firearms. The four men were charged with first-degree robbery, first-degree assault, armed criminal action, and first-degree burglary; three of them faced two counts of each charge with a $1,000,000 cash bond, while Horton faced one count of each with a $500,000 cash bond. The sheriff said detectives were still investigating and that additional charges could follow, but those public reports did not describe murder charges or a resolved outcome in court for Dale’s killing.
