John Douglas “Dougie” Poteet Jr., a 21-year-old White/Caucasian male from Louisville, Kentucky, was fatally wounded in a shooting in Louisville’s Portland neighborhood on the night of July 20, 2023. Poteet had been born in Louisville on January 18, 2002, and was remembered by his family as a loving son, brother, uncle and friend who especially enjoyed spending time with relatives and close friends and going fishing with his uncle.
The shooting unfolded at about 10:30 p.m.
Police said Poteet was sitting inside a vehicle in the 300 block of North 25th Street when he was shot. Although critically wounded, he managed to drive away from where the gunfire occurred. He made it only a short distance before the vehicle crashed into a tree near North 26th and Duncan streets. When Louisville Metro Police officers reached the area, they found him suffering from a gunshot wound to the head. Bystanders had pulled him from the vehicle and attempted CPR, and officers continued emergency aid until medical personnel arrived. Poteet was rushed to UofL Hospital with life-threatening injuries and remained in critical condition before dying from his wounds on July 21, 2023.
The Louisville Metro Police Department’s Homicide Unit took over the investigation. Detectives began gathering evidence from the area, including surveillance video, and interviewed multiple witnesses. According to police, the combination of video evidence and witness information eventually led investigators to identify Shannondoah Carman as the person they believed shot Poteet. Carman was 19 at the time authorities announced his arrest.
The effort to take Carman into custody became a dangerous incident of its own on August 11, 2023. Plainclothes detectives with LMPD’s Criminal Interdiction Division were following Carman, who was described by police as a known homicide suspect, at approximately 2:30 p.m. near the 500 block of North 24th Street. Police said multiple gunshots were fired toward the detectives and that rounds struck an unmarked police vehicle. The officers were not wounded and did not return fire. Carman and his brother, James Carman, were both arrested. Police accused James Carman of firing at the officers; the reporting did not accuse him of participating in Poteet’s killing.
Following his arrest, Shannondoah Carman was charged in connection with Poteet’s death with murder and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon. Police said their case was based in part on the surveillance footage and witness interviews obtained during the homicide investigation. Carman was initially held at Louisville Metro Department of Corrections on a $500,000 bond.
The prosecution continued well beyond the initial arrest. Jefferson Circuit Court records identify the homicide prosecution as case 23CR1592 in Division Five, with prosecutor Emily R. Talbott handling the case. A March 4, 2024 court docket listed Carman for a pretrial conference on one count of murder and one count of possession of a handgun by a convicted felon. The same two charges remained on the docket during another pretrial conference scheduled for July 11, 2024.
The case was later set for trial on April 21, 2025, again with the murder and convicted-felon handgun charges listed. That scheduled trial did not mark the end of the prosecution, however, because later court records continued to show the case as unresolved. By December 1, 2025, Jefferson Circuit Court’s docket had Carman scheduled for another pretrial conference in case 23CR1592, with the murder and handgun charges still listed against him. The publicly indexed docket therefore shows that the homicide prosecution remained active at least through that date rather than documenting a murder conviction or sentencing.
A current Kentucky Department of Corrections record does show Shannondoah Carman incarcerated at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, but the convictions displayed there stem from separate, older criminal cases and should not be confused with the prosecution over Poteet’s death. Those records list convictions entered in March 2026 for criminal-facilitation and firearm offenses associated with earlier cases and earlier crime dates; the corrections record does not list a murder conviction tied to case 23CR1592. Based on the publicly available material located, there is therefore evidence of an arrest, formal murder charge, repeated pretrial proceedings and a trial setting in Poteet’s case, but no reliable online source located establishes that Carman has been convicted, acquitted, had the murder charge dismissed, or been sentenced specifically for killing Poteet.
