‘You’d better be playing,’ triple homicide victim told longtime friend binding him with tape

Caleb Short thought his longtime friend Jervaceay Tapley was just kidding around the night of Jan. 3, 2016, when Tapley called Caleb outside 3057 Bentley Drive, pinned him down and started binding him with duct tape.

He was wrong.

“You’d better be playing,” Caleb told Tapley, according to testimony Tuesday in the triple homicide trial of Rufus Leonard Burks IV.

That testimony came from codefendant Raheam Gibson, who is to plead guilty in the slayings of Caleb, 17; his mother, Gloria Short, 54; and niece, Gianna Lindsey, 10. Tapley pleaded guilty last week to three counts of murder.

For an hour Tuesday, Gibson gave his account of accompanying Tapley and Burks to the Shorts’ Bentley Drive home, where he waited outside after Burks and Tapley entered.

He said Tapley, who knew the Shorts well because Gloria Short’s brother lived with Tapley and Tapley’s grandmother on Calhoun Drive, had planned to “do a lick,” meaning commit a robbery or theft, at the Shorts’ home. Gibson said his understanding at the time was that Tapley would try to get a security code for the home’s alarm system and commit a burglary.

Tapley had other plans.

Gibson said he and Burks met Tapley about 6 or 7 p.m. at Arbor Pointe on Fort Benning Road, and they used a bicycle and moped to travel from there out Macon Road to the Upatoi area. He and Burks were on the moped and Tapley was on the bike.

Tapley ditched the malfunctioning bike near the Georgia driver’s license bureau on Macon Road, Gibson said. After that, they “leap-frogged” the rest of the way, with two riding ahead on the moped before one went back to get the third.

He thought they got to the Shorts’ home off McKee Road about 10 or 11 p.m. Tapley led them through a side gate into the backyard and over to Caleb’s bedroom window. Tapley then made a cellphone call to Caleb, who came to the window, where Tapley told him they’d come from a party and wanted to hang out, Gibson said.

Tapley told Caleb to go to the front door. That’s where Tapley grabbed him and pulled him around to one side of the house, calling for Burks to help bind Tapley with duct tape as they took him into the backyard. Tapley later came back around the house and entered through the front door, Gibson said.

Gibson remained outside. Chief Assistant District Attorney Al Whitaker asked what he was doing, as he waited.

“I wasn’t doing nothing,” Gibson replied. “I was just standing there confused.”

He heard no commotion from inside the house, and never looked in, he said.

Eventually Burks called him to the Shorts’ garage, telling him it was time to go. He and Burks took a silver Volkswagen Beetle that Tapley and Burks had packed with stolen clothes, including eight or nine pairs of Nike Air Jordans, which Caleb collected.

Burks drove the car, with Gibson in the passenger’s seat. Tapley remained behind, and went back inside, Gibson said.

Driving back into town, they tried to call Tapley, but he did not answer. They were in the Wynnton Road area by the time he called them back and told them he would meet them in the Oakland Park neighborhood off South Lumpkin Road.

When they arrived, Tapley already was there, waiting in a GMC Envoy taken from the Shorts’ home, Gibson said. They took the loot from the VW and put it in the Envoy, and Tapley drove off, telling them to walk to his home in Benning Hills.

By the time they got there, it was around midnight or 1 a.m., on Jan. 4. Tapley had Caleb’s clothes spread out on the bed in his bedroom, Gibson said.

He was there about 20 minutes before he walked to his grandmother’s home, he said. Later he heard the news that three people had been slain on Bentley Drive, and told his sister he had been in one of the stolen cars. His sister told his mother, who called police Jan. 6.

That same day, Robert Averett, Gloria Short’s brother who lived with Tapley and Tapley’s grandmother, had a heart attack after hearing about the homicides.

Under cross-examination by Burks’ attorney Jennifer Curry, Gibson said he never saw any blood on Burks, nor noticed Burks was sweating or out of breath, as if he’d been in a struggle.

Curry told jurors in her opening statement Monday that Tapley committed the slayings after Burks left the Shorts’ residence, but detectives said they found blood in the Volkswagen where the driver sat.

Prosecutors have not said what Gibson will plead to, but he testified that he expects to spend at least 30 years in prison. Nineteen at the time of the crime, he is 21 now.

Horrific photos

Gibson’s testimony followed that of police Cpl. Derick Solt, who spent three hours on the witness stand Tuesday morning showing jurors horrific crime-scene photos with the backdrop of Christmas decorations in the Shorts’ home.

Each victim had been bound with tape and bludgeoned in the head with a 20-pound dumbbell.

Gloria Short lay face down in a central hallway, blue painter’s tape wrapped around her wrists and extended to encircle her head and neck. Packing tape was around her thighs. A puddle of blood was beneath her head and more was spattered on the walls.

Just 3 to 4 feet away, in an adjacent living room, Gianna lay face up, some scraps of blue tape on her hands, neck and leg, as if she had worked her way free of the bindings. The bloody dumbbell was on the floor beside her. Like her grandmother, she had a pool of blood at her head.

Some of her grandmother’s blood had splashed onto her, indicating her body was already lying there when Gloria Short was being beaten.

Down the hall, in a walk-in closet off the master bedroom, Caleb lay on the floor, so brutally battered some of his teeth were knocked out. He also was bound with tape, with some brown grass stuck to the adhesive, indicating he was outside when the tape was applied.

Solt said most of the house was in disarray. Spreading from the bodies of Gloria Short and Gianna was a debris field extending into a nearby dining room, and into a kitchen where more of the grandmother’s blood was spattered.

In that debris were pieces of a heavy watering pot, a yellow teapot, and a broken lamp. A piece of the teapot was covered in blood, and appeared to have skin and hair on it, said Solt, who collected fingerprints from it.

Some rooms appeared to have been ransacked, with drawers pulled out and clothes scattered about. Two of Gloria Short’s purses had been emptied onto the bed in the master bedroom, Solt said.

Investigators spent about 10 days collecting evidence at the crime scene, accumulating so much that some of it had to be stored in a secure records room at police headquarters, as the property and evidence division lacked adequate space, Solt said.

Officers worked into the night on the first day, so the bodies could be sent off for autopsies. Upon later learning Gloria Short and Gianna had apparent stab wounds in addition to the head trauma, officers collected a bent pocket knife they found beside an open kitchen drawer, Solt said.

That first day of processing the crime scene was Jan. 4, 2016, the day nurse Robert Short Sr. came home about 7:25 a.m. after working the night shift at Northside Hospital and found his wife, son and granddaughter slain.

“Oh my God! Someone killed my family!” he sobbed to a dispatcher on his 911 call at 8:02 a.m.” They’ve been tied up and beaten. Who would do this to my family? Who would do this?”

He would learn the answer to that question was the boy he and his wife had treated like a member of the family: Tapley, then 16, had spent summers with the Shorts and joined them on fishing trips and vacations to Disney World.

Tapley is 19 now. He and Gibson are to be sentenced after Burks’ trial.

Besides Caleb’s clothes, all the trio gained from the violent rampage were around $600 in cash Gloria Short had withdrawn from a bank machine the day before, about $400 in coins the Shorts collected in a box made for storing wine, a video game player and some games, authorities said.

Burks was 15 in January 2016. Now 17, he is being tried on 10 counts: three counts of malice or intentional murder; three counts of felony murder for allegedly killing the three victims while committing the felony of aggravated assault; two counts of auto theft; and one count each of kidnapping and first-degree burglary.

This story was originally published February 6, 2018 at 5:58 PM with the headline "‘You’d better be playing,’ triple homicide victim told longtime friend binding him with tape."