‘A bullet shot to the head.’ Murder trial witnesses recall finding Columbus man dead
Neighbors described finding the victim’s bloodied body as a trial began Tuesday for two men charged in a fatal shooting during an armed robbery at a Columbus “trap house” where drugs were sold.
Curtis “Baby C” Williams III and Jeffery “Red” Flakes Jr. are accused of gunning down Stanford Duane Jones on Aug. 10, 2018, before ransacking his home on Mellon Street to take cash and drugs, authorities said.
A neighbor called police at 6:10 a.m. that day after finding Jones face-down in a puddle of blood. He was shot in the right arm, right side of the chest and left side of his face, according to a coroner’s report.
Testifying Tuesday, the neighbor said she went to Jones’ home with two other witnesses after hearing his door had been left ajar. The door swung open when they knocked, so they went in and found him dead, she said.
“It was like it had been ransacked,” she said of residence, “and he was lying on the floor.”
Prosecutors played a 911 call on which she was recorded saying she found Jones “with a bullet shot to the head,” her voice breaking with emotion.
She had been accompanied by a boyfriend who lived with her in an apartment next door to Jones’ home. He told police he heard two or three gunshots around 2 to 3:30 a.m., but did not report it because gunfire was so common in the area.
He testified that Williams left a cell phone at his apartment that night, and returned to retrieve it 20 or 30 minutes after the gunshots. Williams was carrying a bag that had been empty when he left the phone, but had something in it when he returned, the witness said.
He said that when Williams came to get his phone, he had blood on his left shoe, and the left side of his pants. Like the gunfire, this also did not alarm him, he said: “People got blood on them all the time. It happens.”
Neither witness saw the shooting, or could place either defendant at the scene at the time. Both suspects were known to frequent the neighborhood, as did others who came to socialize at the horseshoe-shaped apartment complex next to Jones’ home, the neighbors said.
The woman who found the body said she had known Jones for 20 years, and knew he sold drugs next door, including marijuana, crack cocaine, heroin and pills. He often had drugs out on a table, though he kept the heroin in a refrigerator, she said.
Assistant District Attorney Robin Anthony acknowledged Jones’ occupation in her opening statement to jurors: “Mr. Jones was a drug dealer, and these two men knew it,” she said of Flakes and Williams.
She said police found that Jones had set up surveillance cameras, worried he could be robbed. Though the intruders disconnected the camera system’s digital video recorder, they did not take the device, she said.
The recordings showed Williams go into Jones’ home before Flakes arrived at the door minutes later, donning surgical gloves and pulling out a pistol, Anthony said. Then Williams, holding a gun, opened the door for Flakes, and both went in, she said.
“What happens in the dark will come to light,” she told jurors.
Not if it’s so dark you can’t see anything, countered defense attorney Mike Garner, who represents Flakes. “What you’re going to see is a lot of darkness,” he said of the video.
Jones did not buy high-quality cameras, Garner said, so no one recorded on the footage is recognizable.
“This is a really cheap camera that you can buy and put up for $39,” he said. “This is not one of those cameras that can see in the dark.”
He said Flakes and Jones were close: “He was good friends with Stanford. He was over there all the time.” So Flakes had no motivation to kill Jones, he said.
That Flakes was in the neighborhood the night Jones was killed was not unusual, Garner noted, because people were coming and going all the time.
“This was a place where people frequently socialized,” he said.
Anthony Johnson, who represents Williams, declined to give an opening statement, but in questioning witnesses reinforced the point that outsiders frequently visited both the Mellon Street apartments and Jones’ home next door.
During an April 2019 preliminary hearing for Williams, Det. Zack Cole said Jones was found with several guns near his body, but none matched either the .40-caliber or .45-caliber shell casings police found in the apartment.
Garner told jurors Tuesday that police found neither of the guns used to kill Jones.
“The police didn’t come up with any real evidence,” he said. “I think I told you about all the evidence there is.”
Trial delayed
The trial was set to start in August, but had to be postponed when Judge Gil McBride got notice that Flakes’ defense attorney at the time, Michael Eddings, had been disbarred that morning.
The disbarment was unrelated to Flakes’ case. Flakes told McBride then that he wanted to hire new counsel, and the judge rescheduled the trial.
Both Williams, 37, and Flakes, 33, were indicted in November 2020 on allegations of malice or intentional murder, felony murder for killing Jones while committing the felony of aggravated assault, and armed robbery for using firearms to take drugs and money.
Williams has a second pending murder case: He’s charged in the Nov. 16, 2017 slaying of Steve “Stevie” Phillips, 30, found shot through the back of the head on a cut-through trail between Winston Road and Benning Drive.
Phillips was the key witness in a murder case against Kevin Babe “Cali” Henderson, a gangster convicted in the Nov. 12, 2014, execution-style killing of Chad Herring.
Detectives said that when they questioned Williams in that case, he admitted having been with Phillips the day of the homicide, and told them he knew Phillips had a “hit on his head,” meaning a bounty for his death, because of Phillips’ testimony in murder cases.
This story was originally published October 25, 2022 at 2:58 PM.