Richarde Scarborough, 32, a Black man, was killed late on June 23, 2014, in Detroit, Michigan, after gunfire erupted in the area of Kitchener and Freud streets, near the Jefferson Square apartment complex. That night, he was sitting in a car in a parking lot when shots suddenly cracked through the dark, turning an ordinary summer evening into chaos and flight.
A teenage witness, Dontez Abram, said he was only a short distance away—close enough to hear the blasts and, later, to describe what he believed he saw. In the days that followed, he told police he had watched Dashean Keith Williams fire into the vehicle and he identified Williams in a photographic lineup. Dontez had known Williams for years, which made the identification feel, to investigators, less like a guess and more like recognition—yet the weight of repeating that claim in open court would prove complicated.
Inside the car, others were caught in the same terrifying moment. Dioneta Abram, Dontez’s brother, testified that he was in the back seat while Scarborough was in the driver’s seat and Shajuan Hicks sat in front. Dioneta described the long stretch of time they remained parked, and he spoke of a man nicknamed “Tiger”—identified in court as Lafayette Hill—who approached and asked Hicks to step out. Not long after, gunshots rang out and Dioneta ducked down to the floorboard until it stopped; when he climbed out, he heard that Scarborough—known to friends as “Doughboy”—had been shot. Accounts around the scene shifted: Dioneta denied seeing the shooter, yet testimony reflected that people were saying Williams was responsible, even as the name “Tiger” hovered as an alternate suspicion.
As detectives pressed forward, the case gathered statements that didn’t always hold steady. One witness, Sylvone Crosby, acknowledged that a written statement attributed to him said Dioneta had told him Williams shot Scarborough, but Crosby later testified he had lied to police when he said that. Williams’s mother, Khalilah Williams, also became entangled in disputed paperwork—her written statement was used to suggest she had seen her son with a gun shortly before the shooting, while she denied making those claims. In the background of those contradictions, the central story remained the same: a car in a residential parking lot, a sudden burst of gunfire, and a young man left mortally wounded.
Police publicly sought Williams in mid-July, describing him as a 19-year-old also known as “Day-day,” wanted on a murder charge in connection with Scarborough’s death. After he was in custody, Detroit Police Officer Khary Mason, identified as the officer in charge of the case, testified about an interview with Williams in which Williams described bad blood with Scarborough involving a firearm years earlier, and he claimed that “Tiger” shot Scarborough on the night of the killing. The case ultimately went to a jury, which found Williams guilty on January 23, 2015, of first-degree, premeditated murder and felony-firearm; he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the murder conviction and an additional two years for felony-firearm. The conviction and sentence were later affirmed on appeal, and a subsequent federal habeas petition challenging aspects of the trial was denied.
