Dammian Dorsey Trunnell, a 26-year-old man from Jackson, Mississippi, spent the last evening of his life in the familiar neighborhood around Berwood Drive, unaware of how quickly a simmering dispute was about to turn deadly. Late on the night of April 22, 2015, just before midnight, he sat in a silver Ford Expedition parked along the street near the 800 block of Berwood Drive when gunfire erupted.
Neighbors later recalled a chaos of lights and movement as men tried frantically to pull him from the vehicle and rush him toward help, but the damage had already been done; a bullet had struck the back of his head, and he would not survive his injuries.
In the days leading up to the shooting, a seemingly mundane problem had been growing into a bitter feud. A relative of Trunnell’s friend, William Butler, reported that two pit bulls—a male and a female—had gone missing. Several days before the killing, Butler’s cousin by marriage, Robert Decatur, turned up with the missing female dog, claiming he had simply found her running loose and placed her in his car. Butler did not believe the story. He accused Decatur of stealing both dogs, and that accusation became the seed for a night of confrontation. On the evening of April 22, Butler, Trunnell, and their associate Albert English Jr. went first to the home of Decatur’s brother-in-law, Cord Johnson, looking for answers about the missing male dog. Cord later recounted that all three men were visibly upset when they left and that he feared they might “do something” to Decatur.
Their search did not end there. The same trio then went to the home of Decatur’s wife Ashley and her mother, Linda Johnson. Again, the dispute over the missing pit bull flared. Butler, still angry, confronted the women about Decatur and the dog, while Trunnell and English stood by, part of the tense delegation pressing for answers. After the men left, Linda was worried enough to call Decatur, who was at a gym, and warn him that Butler, English, and another man had been to the house and were clearly agitated. During that window of time, Decatur also received a call directly from Butler, who again accused him of stealing the dog. According to court records, Decatur said he tried to calm things down, and the two men agreed to meet in person to talk, choosing a spot tied to the family: the home of Butler and English’s grandmother.
What happened next unfolded quickly. Decatur drove to the agreed meeting place and found a red Chevrolet Tahoe and a silver Ford Expedition already parked along the street. The Expedition, with Trunnell in the driver’s seat, was positioned ahead of where Decatur stopped his own white Chevrolet Impala. Surveillance cameras on a nearby house, owned by former sheriff’s deputy William Melton, recorded the scene. The video showed Decatur’s car roll up at speed, run a stop sign, and come to a halt just a few feet behind the Expedition. Within seconds of stepping out of his vehicle, Decatur raised a handgun and fired multiple shots toward the SUV. Investigators later recovered shell casings and bullets around and inside the Expedition, and noted a shattered rear window and bullet damage to the back door and interior. One of those bullets had entered the back of Trunnell’s head. As others tried to load him into another vehicle to get him to a hospital, Melton called 911 and searched in vain for any weapon near Trunnell or the men around him; only Decatur’s gun, a Glock 9mm later found in his Impala along with additional ammunition, was ever recovered.
News reports from that night described the incident in simpler, starker terms: a man shot while sitting in his car around 11 p.m. on Berwood Drive, one victim dead and another man in jail. The victim’s name was not immediately released, but police quickly focused their attention on 21-year-old Robert Decatur. He was arrested and charged with murder not long after the shooting, even as officers publicly admitted they did not yet know what had sparked the violence. Only later would the full story of the missing dogs, the angry visits to relatives’ homes, and the contested meeting on Berwood Drive come out in court.
In the criminal case that followed, prosecutors argued that Decatur had not acted in self-defense but had instead escalated a tense personal dispute into lethal violence. At trial, Decatur admitted he was the only person to fire a gun that night and that a bullet from his weapon killed Trunnell, though he claimed he had been frightened by threats and believed others were armed. Surveillance video and witness testimony, however, undermined his account: the recording showed how little time passed between his arrival and the first shots, and neighbors and investigators described a scene where no weapon other than Decatur’s was found. After hearing the evidence, a Hinds County jury convicted Decatur of second-degree murder for killing Dammian Trunnell. He was sentenced to thirty years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, with ten years to serve, twenty years suspended, and five years of supervised probation. On appeal, Decatur challenged rulings about character evidence, testimony regarding alleged threats, and the trial court’s refusal to instruct the jury on heat-of-passion manslaughter, but in May 2021 the Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed both his conviction and his sentence, leaving the judgment that he murdered Trunnell in place.
