Delray Crittenden, a 16-year-old Black male from Lithonia, was drawn into a violent chain of events in the early hours of July 1, 2014, after a house party in DeKalb County. According to the evidence later laid out in court, Delray and two other teenagers had already gone once that night to buy marijuana from David Frank Moore. After the party broke up, the three returned to Moore’s house for more.
Aaron Byfield was driving, Nyriek Williams sat in the front passenger seat, and Delray rode in the back on the driver’s side. When they arrived, Delray told the driver to back into the driveway, and as Moore came to the car, a heated argument broke out over claims that Moore had given Delray less marijuana than he had paid for.
What followed was sudden and brutal. Court findings say gunfire erupted at the car. Byfield was shot in the back as he tried to pull away and blacked out. Williams was also shot and ended up in the yard across the street. A neighbor saw a man with a revolver standing over a younger wounded man, later identified as Delray, who was bleeding and leaning against the neighbor’s car. Delray was rushed into surgery, but he did not survive his wounds. Investigators recovered a. 40-caliber pistol from the front seat of the victims’ car and a. 38-caliber revolver near Moore’s driveway. Ballistics testing later showed that bullets recovered from the street, from Williams’ body, and from Delray’s body had been fired from that. 38-caliber revolver. Moore himself was not wounded. Investigators also found no marijuana at the scene.
The case ultimately centered on David Frank Moore as the lone suspect identified in the court record. In October 2014, a DeKalb County grand jury indicted him on charges that included malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. At trial in December 2015, jurors acquitted him of malice murder but convicted him on the remaining major counts tied to Delray’s killing and the shootings of the two surviving teens. The sentence that followed was severe: life in prison for felony murder, along with consecutive prison terms for the aggravated assaults on Williams and Byfield and for multiple firearm offenses.
Moore later tried to overturn the outcome, arguing that the evidence was not strong enough and that the trial court had made several errors, including refusing to let the jury hear a justification or self-defense theory. But in August 2019, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the convictions. The justices said the evidence was sufficient for a reasonable jury to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In that final legal telling, Delray’s death was not left as an unanswered neighborhood tragedy; it became a murder case that ended with one defendant, David Frank Moore, convicted and his convictions left standing on appeal.
