Juwone Demilo Doleman was a 23-year-old Black man from La Grange, Kentucky, a young father of two who was remembered in his obituary and online memorials as a caring, humble, often funny presence in his family’s life. He belonged to Shelby Congregational Methodist Church and left behind two small children, Ariana and Brayden, their mother Katelynn Bader, his parents, Annette Doleman and Jerry Beach, and a large extended family of grandparents, siblings, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins who
described him as a devoted dad and beloved relative.
In early September 2020, Juwone traveled to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to spend time with friends at the Westport Road apartment of Kelsey Davis. According to court records, he had invited a friend from Louisville, 21-year-old Jalen Ray Williams, to come down and “party” with them. The three spent part of the night together in the apartment before Juwone and Davis eventually went to a bedroom to have sex, leaving Williams alone in the living room.
What happened next became the focus of a homicide investigation and, later, a murder trial. In the early morning hours of September 6, 2020, shots were fired inside the apartment’s bedroom. Davis would later testify that she awoke to the sound of a gunshot, suddenly unable to see and struggling to breathe. When her vision returned, she made her way toward the front door and saw Williams fleeing the apartment. Around 8:30 a.m., Elizabethtown police responded to reports of gunfire in the 600 block of Westport Road and found both Juwone and Davis suffering from gunshot wounds in the residence. Juwone was pronounced dead at the scene, while Davis was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition but survived.
From the beginning, investigators emphasized that the attack was not random. Later reporting based on a Hardin District Court warrant indicated that money, a handgun, and jewelry belonging to Juwone were missing, as well as Davis’s cell phone, reinforcing police suspicions that the shooting was tied to a robbery rather than a chance encounter. Within hours of the shooting, detectives had quietly focused on Jalen Williams as their primary suspect, but they deliberately withheld his name from the public to avoid driving him into hiding while they worked to track him down.
By late September 2020, police announced that Williams had been arrested in Louisville with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service and Louisville Metro Police. Local news outlets reported that he was charged in Hardin County with homicide/murder for the killing of Juwone, first-degree assault for the shooting of Davis, first-degree robbery, and tampering with physical evidence; authorities also noted that he already had outstanding warrants from Jefferson County for an unrelated robbery and wanton endangerment case. Williams was booked into the Hardin County Detention Center on a $1 million cash bond, marking a decisive turn from a frantic manhunt to a case now moving through the courts.
At trial, Williams admitted that he had shot both Juwone and Davis but claimed he did so in self-defense. He testified that Juwone had called him into the bedroom, pointed a gun at him, and tried to rob him, sparking a struggle in which Williams said he wrested control of the weapon and fired. Prosecutors presented a starkly different picture, arguing that Williams was in the middle of robbing Juwone while he and Davis slept and that he shot them as they lay in bed. Davis’s account—that she awoke to the sound of a gunshot and then saw Williams fleeing—supported the Commonwealth’s version of events. A Hardin County jury ultimately rejected Williams’s self-defense claim and found him guilty of murder, first-degree assault, first-degree robbery, tampering with physical evidence, and being a convicted felon in possession of a handgun. The trial court imposed a combined forty-year prison sentence for those offenses.
The legal battle did not end there. Williams appealed his conviction and sentence to the Kentucky Supreme Court, which reviewed the evidence and his arguments in 2022. The high court affirmed his convictions and the length of his sentence, vacating only the portion of the judgment that imposed jail fees, a technical issue unrelated to his guilt or time in prison. According to the Kentucky Department of Corrections, Williams is now an active inmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary, serving time for the murder of Juwone and related offenses. Records show a conviction date of October 5, 2021, for the Hardin County murder, a 25-year sentence on that count alone, additional years on the associated assault, robbery, tampering, and weapons charges, and a projected sentence expiration in August 2070, with parole eligibility not until September 2040.
While the criminal case against the man who killed him has been resolved, the picture that emerges of Juwone from obituaries and memorials is not that of a crime statistic or a legal file, but of a young father with a wide circle of loved ones who still speak of him as a “sweet” and “goofy” presence, a hustling provider and a “good father” whose absence is felt in the everyday lives of his children and family. Their grief, expressed in church funerals, graveside burials, and online tributes, continues long after the courtroom closed and the prison doors locked behind the man responsible for the shooting that ended his life.
