Derrick Calhoun, 36, a Black man from Detroit, was killed on December 22, 2017, after a tense encounter at the M T Elliott-Charlevoix Market on the city’s east side. What began as a verbal clash inside the store hardened into something more deliberate. In the close, fluorescent-lit space of the market, he argued with another man, and after others intervened to separate them, the departing man pointed at Calhoun and made a promise that sounded like a threat: “I got you.”
Not long after, according to investigators and later court findings, the two men who had come to the store together drove away in a vehicle—then returned roughly ten minutes later. Calhoun stepped out with people close to him, including his friend Raymond Hawkins and his fiancée Bianca Sharp. As they moved along the building, Calhoun drifted toward the back, slipping beyond the view of the store’s security cameras. From a nearby vehicle, gunfire burst out, shots fired from inside the car. Calhoun was hit—police reported he was struck at least once in the abdomen—and he was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In the first days after the killing, Detroit police leaned on surveillance and witness accounts, trying to piece together faces, clothing, and movements from the moments before the shots. They appealed to the public for help identifying two people they described as persons of interest, sharing that one wore a blue bubble coat while the other wore a black North Face jacket. The outline of the getaway also took shape: a gray Dodge Challenger or Charger with a black racing stripe, circling back after the argument and then accelerating away westbound on Charlevoix Street. As it fled, the car struck another vehicle, but kept going, vanishing into the streets as the search widened.
The man later charged in Calhoun’s death, Romante Jomall Adams, was eventually found far from Detroit. Police in Knoxville, Tennessee, announced that Adams had been captured by members of the Smoky Mountain Fugitive Task Force shortly before 9 p.m. on a Monday night and would be held in Tennessee while extradition back to Michigan was arranged.
The case did not stop at an arrest. Court records describe a prosecution that framed the shooting as calculated retaliation after the in-store confrontation, with Adams and a co-defendant, Brian Kyle Sherrod, tied to the return drive and the gunfire from the vehicle. Both men were tried together and convicted by a jury of first-degree premeditated murder, along with other firearm-related offenses tied to shooting from a vehicle and possession of a gun as a felon. On appeal, the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld Adams’s convictions and sentences; he was sentenced as a habitual offender to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the murder conviction, along with additional prison terms for intentionally discharging a weapon from a vehicle causing death, felon-in-possession, and felony-firearm. Sherrod’s convictions were also affirmed, with the appellate court ordering only a correction to his judgment of sentence. The Michigan Supreme Court later declined to take up Adams’s application for further review.
