Nickolas Doss, a 17-year-old Black male, was found dead in Tallahassee, Florida on December 31, 2014, his life ending in violence on the very day the calendar was turning. City workers discovered his body near Chapman Pond, and the news rippled quickly through the community—through the hallways of Amos P. Godby High School, where he was a senior, and through the people who knew him as more than a name in a police report.
Investigators soon focused on Deondrae Hudson.
Police said the killing unfolded inside a vehicle, with a witness later describing Hudson in the back seat and Doss in the front passenger seat. After the shooting, authorities said, the body was abandoned and evidence was hastily handled—items hidden, and an attempt made to set the vehicle on fire—before the witness ultimately went to law enforcement.
For several days, Hudson eluded capture. When police efforts tightened, the search spilled into the streets: authorities described a late-night encounter after an officer spotted Hudson get into a car outside a convenience store, followed by a short pursuit, gunfire, and suspects running into a nearby neighborhood. A K-9 unit located 21-year-old Kenny Sharpe with a non-life-threatening gunshot wound, while another suspect was still being sought at that moment. By the following day, Tallahassee police reported Hudson had been arrested.
Hudson faced serious charges connected to the case, including premeditated murder, arson, and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, as reported in contemporaneous coverage. Investigators also believed there had been a fight before the fatal shooting, a detail that added a grim, intimate edge to what had already shaken a school and a city.
Years later, WCTV reported that Hudson was found guilty of first-degree murder in Doss’s death. The case also reached Florida’s First District Court of Appeal, which affirmed the outcome in April 2020, closing one more legal door after the initial shock had long faded into an ache carried by those who remembered Doss as a student, an athlete, and a son whose family would never see him walk across a graduation stage.
