The two other young men who were with them in a Statesboro motel room when Kentaevious Davis allegedly shot and killed Christopher Joyce and Jamaryce Mincey testified Wednesday, the third day of Davis’ trial on murder and other charges.
The trial is taking place more than 620 days since the shootings occurred, around noon on Feb. 29, 2024, at the Days Inn on Fair Road. But neither police, emergency medical personnel nor even motel staff knew the bodies were there until eight hours later, as now shown from testimony and evidence such as phone records and time-stamped video.
In addition to Davis, also called “Spook,” who was 20 then and is now 22; Mincey, called “J-Mo,” who was 23; and Joyce, nicknamed “Tootie,” the two other people in the room at the time of the shootings were Devin Johnson, sometimes called “D-Mo,” and Damari Tigner. That these five were there has now been established with evidence such as time-stamped images from a motel surveillance camera that showed the room door opening onto the ground-floor walkway.
Devin Johnson, now 24, was first to testify Wednesday. When Chief Assistant District Attorney Jillian Gibson asked what they had been doing that day at the motel, Johnson said, “chilling, getting high.” He and others testified that beginning that morning they had been smoking what they thought of as “molly,” a street name for various drugs and combinations. Surveillance camera video showed these men passing around cigars, apparently drug-laced “blounts,” outside in front of the room.
After other members of the group of family and friends who had been staying there left the motel, those five went inside the room that had been rented by Tigner’s mother.
When Gibson asked who had a gun that day, Johnson said, “Spook, J-Mo and Tootie,” in other words the defendant and the two victims.
In the moments before the shooting, Joyce was on the bed closer to the door, Johnson was on the other bed, Mincey was standing by the mirror near the sink in the back of the room, according to Johnson.
Asked what Davis had been doing, Johnson said, “First he was chilling with me by the bed, and he went to pointing the gun at Tootie, and I was like, ‘You tripping, what’s going on? …’ and he got up, walked to the back, and that’s when I heard the gun go off.”
When Gibson asked who fired the shot, Johnson answered “Spook.”
“By the time I turned around, he started to hit the other victim,” Johnson continued, and to a clarifying question from the prosecutor, he said, “He was already shooting at the other victim.”
At least 13 shots were fired, according to the number of empty cartridge casings police found in the room.
Damari Tigner testifies
Meanwhile, Damari Tigner, who is now 18 and was just 16 then, was in the motel room’s bathroom, across from the mirror, “rolling a blount” or something, Johnson had said.
When he testified separately, next, Tigner said had gone into the bathroom and put in his earphones to avoid the loud music the others were playing and had been smoking his “own personal molly joint.”
“I shut the door. When I heard gunshots, I opened the door,” Tigner said. “I ran out the room.”
He said he had seen someone lying in front of the door “with a single shot to the head,” that being “J-Mo” Mincey, and that he had seen “Tootie” Joyce on the bed only out the corner of his eye.
Johnson had said that Davis said, “Let’s go,” and they all ran out. Tigner said Johnson was already outside when he went out, “and I ran behind him.”
Viewed later in Wednesday’s day in court when the Statesboro Police Department’s lead investigator on the case, Detective Katie Reese, testified, time-stamped video stills from the surveillance camera showed Davis, Johnson and Tigner hurried out of the room, not really running at first, at 11:58 a.m. When they were still in sight on the motel walk, Tigner ran back to the room – he said it was to get a phone – but found the door wouldn’t open with the card, and turned and hurried back to follow the others.
The three then ran, or walked fast, through a wooded area, as also seen on a storage building’s surveillance video. They later waited together, apparently for about an hour, until Tigner’s mother and Johnson’s sister returned in a car from Glennville to pick them up at a Subway restaurant in Statesboro, and they all rode together to Vidalia.
But Johnson and Tigner testified that they didn’t know why Davis shot the other two men. They said they hadn’t been aware of any trouble between them and that they didn’t talk about it during the drive. “I do not recall” was a frequent short answer from these and some other witnesses when Davis’ defense attorneys, Assistant Public Defenders Que’Andra Campbell and Daveniya Fisher, cross-examined them about changes between earlier and later statements to police and in the courtroom.
After Detective Reese and some other witnesses were heard Wednesday afternoon, the prosectors rested their case shortly after 4 p.m., meaning the defense can call its own witnesses beginning Thursday morning. Senior Judge John R. “Robbie” Turner sent jurors home early with instructions to return before 9 a.m.