Robert Gerard “HustleMan” Dowdy, 31, a Black man, was a Chattanooga native remembered by family as a devoted father and fiancé who had graduated from Howard High School and worked for years as a machine operator at Arcade Beauty. On Monday, June 22, 2020, his life ended abruptly after a burst of gunfire on the city’s Westside, turning an ordinary summer afternoon into a scene of sirens, frantic phone calls, and a family’s worst news arriving without warning.
Police said the shooting happened just before 2 p.m. in the 100 block of West 38th Street. Two people were hit; Dowdy suffered life-threatening injuries and died, while the other victim made it to the hospital and survived with injuries that authorities initially described as not life-threatening. The early hours of the investigation were spare on motive and heavy on uncertainty, with detectives trying to piece together who fired and why, as the neighborhood processed yet another shooting on a familiar stretch of pavement.
Investigators later outlined a chilling prelude: a Facebook Live stream recorded shortly before the gunfire. In a federal affidavit connected to the broader investigation, authorities described a live video that began in the late afternoon and showed several people inside an SUV, with what appeared to be multiple pistols visible. Not long after the recording ended, investigators said, a silver Nissan SUV drove down West 38th Street and opened fire into a crowd gathered around Nine Brothers convenience store at 101 W. 38th Street. Dowdy was struck in the torso, and another man, identified in the affidavit as Brandon Rakestraw, was hit in the leg and required emergency surgery. The affidavit also described surveillance footage in which a shooter leaned out of a window and fired over the roof of the vehicle, and it reported that the crowd near the store largely consisted of people who had just come from a funeral service earlier that day.
As the case moved from shock to manhunt, arrests followed in stages. Chattanooga police reported that Montrell Jawon Franklin was arrested July 1, 2020, in Knoxville with help from multiple agencies, and that Tremaine Dillard was taken into custody later that same day in Chattanooga. Weeks later, on August 11, 2020, Tyqurerio Malone was taken into custody on an active homicide warrant. Police said Malone faced a criminal homicide charge along with an attempted criminal homicide charge tied to the surviving victim.
In a later update, authorities said a Hamilton County grand jury indicted three suspects in the case, and reporting described investigators obtaining an affidavit that centered the Facebook Live recording as a key lead, placing the suspects together in the moments before the shooting and showing them openly displaying what appeared to be semiautomatic pistols. Years after the gunfire on West 38th, court reporting said a defendant named Eric Sims went to trial as the last of the charged men to face a jury, and that a verdict ultimately found him guilty of first-degree murder and additional offenses connected to the drive-by shooting.
