Dantae Nashaun Simmons, 23, a Black man, was rushed to Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie on the evening of July 2, 2018, after a shooting that unfolded fast and left little time for help to arrive in the usual way. Someone who had been there drove him to the hospital, and police were alerted when he arrived, but the effort came too late—Simmons died from his wounds that night.
Behind the hospital visit was a stretch of roadway in Glen Burnie that investigators soon treated like the true beginning of the story: the 500 block of Short Curve Road. Detectives worked outward from that location, interviewing witnesses and collecting physical evidence, trying to map the moments that led to the gunfire and the frantic trip to the emergency room. What emerged from the investigation, according to police, was enough to point to a specific person as the shooter rather than an unknown assailant lost to the dark.
In February 2019, Anne Arundel County police announced they had obtained an arrest warrant for Darius Devon Mackell of Annapolis and took him into custody without incident. Prosecutors filed a stack of serious charges tied to Simmons’ death, including murder counts along with robbery and firearms-related charges, and the case moved into the long, grinding machinery of the courts, where the facts of that night would be tested not by neighborhood rumor but by what could be proven.
On November 17, 2020, the case turned on the kind of detail that can decide a person’s fate: whether the judge believed the key witness. Circuit Judge Stacy McCormack found Mackell not guilty of murder, robbery, and firearms charges connected to Simmons’ death, ruling in part that the prosecution’s witness was not credible. With that decision, the legal story ended in acquittal, leaving the killing itself—what truly happened on Short Curve Road and why—still hauntingly unresolved in the public record beyond the court’s conclusion that the state had not met its burden.
