January shooting victim named his killer as he was dying, Columbus police say
Joseph Dukes told police officers who found him dying Jan. 20 beside his car on Moye Road that Deante Caruthers was the man who shot him, a detective testified Monday in Columbus Recorder’s Court.
Tracking the two men’s cell phones, investigators were able not only to pinpoint where the shooting happened, on Bayberry Drive near Buena Vista Road, but to locate shell casings, witnesses, and home security cameras that recorded the assault, Detective Sherman Hayes told Judge Julius Hunter.
But Hayes would not say why the two men met there to confront each other in the street, “face to face, nose to nose,” as he described it. “We’re still investigating what we believe possibly to be a motive,” he said.
As Caruthers stood in court facing a single charge of murder, Hayes described how police acting on Dukes’ dying words backtracked the victim to determine where he and Caruthers last crossed paths.
The investigation
Patrol officers called to a car crash around 3:45 p.m. at 601 Moye Road found the 35-year-old mortally wounded beside his white BMW convertible, pleading for his life and telling officers Caruthers shot him. Dukes repeated this as he was rushed to Piedmont Columbus Regional, Hayes said.
Dukes died at the hospital at 4:44 p.m., according to the coroner’s office.
Police began researching Caruthers, finding only one Columbus resident with that name and getting a cell phone number from his mother, Hayes said. They got search warrants for cell phone data for his phone and for Dukes’, and saw the two were “practically on top of each other” on Bayberry Drive, where a police sergeant found three 9-millimeter shell casings.
The site is less than a mile from where police found Dukes on Moye Road, the detective said.
Canvassing the neighborhood, officers found two witnesses who from a passing car about 20 feet away had seen the two men face off, and a third witness who saw a portion of the incident from up the street, the detective said. Two picked Caruthers’ picture from a six-man photo lineup, he said.
Checking neighborhood home-security systems, police found footage from two cameras that recorded the entire dispute, from the two men standing close as they traded words, to Caruthers stepping back, pulling a pistol and firing three times as Dukes, trying to duck away, fell to the pavement, Hayes said.
Questioned by defense attorney William Kendrick, Hayes said the confrontation recorded about 3:40 p.m. lasted only 60 to 90 seconds.
Judge Hunter asked where Dukes was hit. Hayes said police saw wounds to his chest near his heart, his chest near a shoulder, one through his arm and another in his back. They think one of the bullets likely caused two of the punctures, he said.
Hunter found probable cause to send the case to Muscogee Superior Court, ordering Caruthers, 29, held without bond.
This story was originally published February 8, 2021 at 11:31 AM.