Terrance Davis, a 25-year-old man from Memphis, Tennessee, was found dead in the street around 7:00 a.m. on March 6, 2014, near Cedar Street and North Third, after someone called police to report a body lying by the curb. Officers arriving in daylight saw blood concentrated around his head and shell casings scattered close by. Neighbors later told investigators that the neighborhood had been unusually dark because of a power outage, and while no one claimed to have seen the shooting itself, at
least two residents said they heard multiple gunshots sometime between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m. the night before, followed by the sound of a vehicle squealing away.
The case began to tighten around a suspect from the same city within hours. At approximately 2:45 a.m. on March 6—well before Davis’s body was discovered—Calvin Banks arrived at Methodist North Hospital with a gunshot wound to his foot, accompanied by his girlfriend, Lavinceia Allen. Banks initially told police he had been shot during a drug deal gone wrong at the Greenbrier Apartments, but after officers noticed contradictions between his account and Allen’s, he changed his story and admitted he had shot himself with his own gun. Allen gave consent for officers to search her vehicle, and police recovered a loaded. 380 pistol from the trunk. Investigators later tied that gun to the killing through firearms examination: bullet fragments removed from Davis during the autopsy and a spent bullet recovered at the scene were determined to have been fired from Banks’s pistol.
The autopsy told its own grim story. Davis had been shot multiple times—wounds to his left cheek and jaw, chest, left hand, and left hip. The medical examiner also described evidence that at least one shot was fired with the muzzle pressed against Davis’s cheek, leaving an abrasion pattern consistent with a muzzle imprint and depositing soot deep in the wound—details that prosecutors later leaned on to argue the killing was deliberate. Toxicology testing detected heroin components in Davis’s blood along with Xanax, but the manner of death was ruled homicide, and the cause was multiple gunshot wounds.
As investigators reconstructed Davis’s last known movements, a portrait emerged of a young father whose mother said had been struggling with addiction and spending time with people she considered dangerous. She told the court that Davis had been staying at “Ali’s house” at the Ridgecrest Apartments in the nights leading up to his death and that he was injured even before the shooting—his dominant arm was in a cast after surgery from an earlier assault, and he had bandages on his face. Those details added weight to the sense that Davis was vulnerable in the hours before he was left on a darkened street.
Two different witnesses later supplied narrative threads about what happened the night Davis was killed, and both placed Banks at the center of it. Raphael Farmer, who said he knew Banks from the neighborhood, testified that while the two were incarcerated in 2014, Banks admitted shooting Davis. According to Farmer, Banks was angry because Davis had pointed him toward a robbery target that didn’t produce what Banks expected, leaving him furious over “not getting anything.” Farmer said Banks described getting out of a car on Cedar Street and shooting Davis in the head, then driving off and leaving him there. Farmer also said Banks mentioned that “Ali” and others were present.
Allen’s testimony—revealed to prosecutors only on the day she was set to testify—added an eyewitness account that put people in the car with names or nicknames but no clear identities in the public record: “Ali,” “Little Yo,” and “Deedee.” She told the court that Banks had borrowed her car earlier that day and returned late, upset that “the mission” had not gone well, and focused with particular anger on Davis. She said Banks drove to a street in North Memphis, ordered everyone but her out of the car, then raised his gun while the men stood behind the vehicle. Allen said she shut her eyes and heard gunfire, and when she looked again, Banks, Ali, and Little Yo returned to the car—without Davis.
The aftermath, as described in court, was frantic and self-protective. Allen said that later, back at the Ridgecrest Apartments, Banks accidentally fired the gun again while handling it, shooting himself. Terrified, she drove him to the hospital and—panicked—threw the gun into the trunk. When police questioned them, she repeated a robbery story she said was Banks’s version of events, and prosecutors later granted her immunity for false statements connected to the case and for assistance she had provided around the homicide. After Banks was jailed, Allen testified that he called her and complained that she had let police take “his baby,” which she understood as his gun.
Ultimately, Banks was treated as the primary and only publicly identified suspect, and the case moved from investigation to prosecution. A Shelby County grand jury indicted him for first-degree premeditated murder and for being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. A jury convicted Banks of first-degree premeditated murder and the felon-in-possession charge, and the trial court imposed a life sentence. Banks challenged the sufficiency of the evidence on appeal, but the conviction was affirmed, with the appellate court pointing to the multiple gunshot wounds, the close-contact shot, the failure to render aid, and the ballistics link to the gun recovered from Allen’s trunk.
