Dazavius J. “DJ” Palm, a 22-year-old man from Morton, Mississippi, was killed on the night of December 10, 2016, during what began as an ordinary gathering at a friend’s home. He had grown up between Magee and Morton, settling in Morton around 2010, where he worked as an equipment operator for a construction company and was active in his church community. His obituary describes a young father devoted to his children, close to his extended family, and known for his love of dogs and horses, rooted in the small-town rhythms of central Mississippi life. On that December Saturday, he joined friends at the Morton home of Eddie Lee Dozier, a familiar gathering spot where a group of men spent the evening hanging out before the night narrowed down to just four people: Palm, Dozier, Quayteace “Quay” Evans, and Evans’s younger brother, Samuel “Tez” Evans.
According to court records and trial testimony, the atmosphere inside Dozier’s house shifted from casual to deadly in a matter of moments. Dozier later testified that he and Palm were standing together in the kitchen, talking, when Quay Evans suddenly entered the room and opened fire on both men without warning. Palm was struck once in the head and collapsed, while Dozier was also shot in the head but miraculously survived. Tez Evans told the court that he had just stepped into the kitchen when his brother began shooting and that he never saw either Palm or Dozier holding a gun or arguing in a way that foreshadowed violence. After the shots, the brothers fled the house, but Tez said Quay ran back inside briefly; Tez heard another shot and then watched Quay return, later admitting he had fired Dozier’s gun into the floor to make it look as if Dozier had fired first.
When investigators questioned Quay Evans after his arrest, he gave two written statements that shifted some of the details but kept Palm and Dozier at the center of a claimed self-defense scenario. In the first statement, made five days after the shooting, Evans said Dozier had accused him of sleeping with Dozier’s girlfriend and that he only fired back after Dozier shot at him, striking both Palm and Dozier in the exchange. In a later statement, taken about a month after the killing, Evans described overhearing Palm and Dozier angrily talking about him and possibly threatening his life; he said he “blinked out,” experienced a kind of tunnel vision, and then shot Dozier and Palm, later firing Dozier’s gun into the floor in an attempt to stage the scene. At trial, Evans took the stand and repeated his claim that he believed both men were armed and intended to shoot him, insisting he did not set out to kill anyone even as he admitted that he intentionally pulled the trigger and hit both Palm and Dozier.
Law enforcement and prosecutors saw the events very differently. Scott County Sheriff Mike Lee announced that deputies had arrested 24-year-old former Mississippi State University defensive lineman Quay Evans and his 28-year-old brother, Samuel M. Evans, in connection with the shooting. Both men were jailed on charges of murder and attempted murder after witnesses identified them as being involved in the killing of D.J. Palm and the wounding of Eddie Dozier that Saturday night in Morton. Palm’s death was recorded in gun-violence databases under the name “DJ Palmer,” noting that he was lost to gun violence in Morton on December 10, 2016, linking his final moments in Dozier’s kitchen to the broader national record of firearm-related deaths. Dozier, transported in critical condition to a Jackson hospital after being shot in the head, ultimately survived to become a key witness describing Palm’s final minutes and contradicting Evans’s story of self-defense.
The case against Quay Evans moved to Scott County Circuit Court, where a grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder in Palm’s death and attempted murder in the shooting of Dozier. At trial, jurors heard from Dozier, from Samuel “Tez” Evans, and from investigators who recounted Quay’s changing statements. They also heard Evans’s own testimony asserting that he acted out of fear for his life. After weighing these accounts, the jury rejected the original charges but did not accept Evans’s claim of lawful self-defense: they found him guilty of the lesser-included offenses of manslaughter for killing Palm and aggravated assault for shooting Dozier. The trial judge imposed consecutive twenty-year sentences for each conviction—twenty years for manslaughter and twenty for aggravated assault—along with an additional five-year enhancement for using a firearm during the aggravated assault, for a total of forty-five years in state prison.
On appeal, the legal focus shifted from what happened in Dozier’s kitchen to how the court had handled Evans’s sentencing. The Mississippi Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s verdicts and the two twenty-year prison terms but ruled that the extra five-year firearm enhancement had been imposed without proper pretrial notice to Evans that prosecutors would seek it, a violation of due process under existing state precedent. The appellate court removed that portion of the sentence, leaving Evans to serve two consecutive twenty-year terms—a total of forty years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections—for the killing of Dazavius “DJ” Palm and the shooting of Eddie Dozier. Publicly available records make clear that Samuel M. Evans was initially arrested and jailed alongside his brother on murder and attempted murder charges, but they do not provide the same detailed account of how, or even whether, his case ultimately proceeded to trial, leaving the official resolution of his role less visible than the long paper trail that now documents Quay Evans’s conviction and sentence for the night that ended DJ’s life.
