In the early hours of January 29, 2017, downtown Indianapolis was thinning out after a Saturday night when Wilbur Morton, a 29-year-old Black man, left the Bu Da Lounge on East Market Street with the crowd being ushered outside at closing time. What should have been the usual noisy spill of patrons onto the sidewalk instead turned into a chaotic confrontation in the middle of the street. As tensions rose and voices escalated, a large fight erupted among people who had just been inside the club, drawing in bystanders and turning the block outside the lounge into a swirl of shouting and shoving.
Amid that confusion, a single gunshot cut through the noise. Morton was struck once in the upper body, a wound later described as a single shot to the chest, and he collapsed in the street as people scattered in panic. Emergency crews rushed him from East Market Street to Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital, but the injury was too severe and he was pronounced dead. In the immediate aftermath, detectives with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department cordoned off the area around 148 East Market Street, working through the shell casings, blood on the pavement, and shifting statements from frightened or reluctant witnesses trying to piece together who had pulled the trigger in the crowded melee.
In the weeks that followed, investigators focused on a man they believed had been at the center of the conflict that night. By mid-February 2017, IMPD homicide detectives identified 29-year-old Dontae Davis as the suspected shooter and obtained an arrest warrant. Working with the department’s Violent Crimes Unit, they tracked Davis to a casino in Shelbyville, southeast of Indianapolis, where he was taken into custody without incident. Prosecutors charged him with murder in Morton’s death and with unlawful possession of a firearm by a serious violent felon, publicly linking him to the fatal shot that ended the brawl outside the Bu Da Lounge. News reports at the time framed the arrest as a major break in the downtown homicide, suggesting that the fight outside the nightclub had escalated when Davis, already prohibited from having a gun, allegedly drew a weapon and fired.
But as the case moved toward trial, the seemingly solid narrative began to unravel. By August 2018, prosecutors told the court they could no longer proceed: key witnesses were no longer cooperating, and the evidence they had was not strong enough to sustain a murder prosecution. A judge dismissed the murder charge and the related firearm count tied specifically to Morton’s death, ending the homicide case without a jury ever hearing it. At the same time, Davis admitted guilt in a separate case from March 2016 involving unlawful possession of a firearm by a serious violent felon and operating a vehicle while intoxicated in a way that endangered another person; he received a sentence of four years of electronic monitoring and home detention under Marion County Community Corrections. He also later pleaded guilty in a 2017 battery case and served additional jail time for that offense, but those convictions were unrelated to the shooting outside the lounge.
For Morton’s killing, the dismissal left a stark void. Accounts preserved in later write-ups describe how the fight that night began with a confrontation involving women inside the club, how Davis allegedly became involved, and how Morton reportedly struck him after seeing a woman hit, only for the violence to spill out onto Market Street moments before the fatal shot. Yet with witnesses unwilling or unable to repeat those stories under oath and no one ultimately convicted of the shooting, the case slipped from the criminal courts into the murkier territory of unresolved tragedy. Years later, the address of Bu Da Lounge is still remembered in true-crime and neighborhood lore as the place where a night out downtown ended with one man dying in the street and a homicide case that, despite an arrest and serious charges, never found a lasting resolution in front of a jury.
