August 3, 2021 • 45 mins
The opening of Danyé's cell phone leads deeply into the man himself.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Content warning. This podcast discusses violence, murder, suicide, civil unrest,
aggressive policing, racism, and lynching. If you or anyone you
know is considering suicide, her self harm, or just need
to talk about problems, please call the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline to seven three to five or text the Crisis
(00:26):
text line at seven four one. Previously and after the uprising,
did he seem excited about going on that night? Danny
said he did. It's my brother, he said he did.
I saw leave out the door last night because I
was sitting in kids. Do you know about what time?
That was? About nine o'clock? Not? He needn't leave in
(00:49):
a car does things as well? His calls out, so
there's no sheet. Un If this happens to your child,
would you want to get down to the bottom of
this and find out what really happened? You might know
the pass code to Danye's phone? Is that true? I
have a might be. No one guy has followed open,
(01:12):
no one has gotten his phone open yet this is
a disease person's phone. Correct. I wish I had a
clearer answer for you. A lot of these phones that
have a Qualcom chip set usually give me an option
to bypass the pass code, but I never have luck
with them and not too hopefull on it. What you're
(01:39):
looking at is the aftermath of the grand jury deciding
not to indict Officer Wilson. A young man found hanging
from a tree in October. His mom believes someone murdered
(01:59):
her son targeting him. Danye became an activist in the
wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown by a
white police officer. That's why Melissa mckinne's wants St. Louis
County police to dig deeper to her son's death. He
was not suicidal. This is after the uprising, the death
(02:22):
of Donye Dion Jones. I don't know if she told
you about what they did with the evidence. They destroyed it.
There was they destroyed it after we do that we
(02:43):
was having a private investigation and that we needed that
they destroyed it. That's enough of it. This is okay,
so okay for it's all Jack, Okay, It's what it's about.
Horrible investigation and it looks it looks suspect on every level.
So now what are you doing? What were you doing?
(03:06):
That was Melissa speaking with retired University City Municipal Police
Commander Captain Carol Jackson again. After learning details about the
investigation into Danie's death. Captain Jackson expressed her opinion that
it sounded rather substandard and she wanted to know what
Melissa was going to do to continue to move forward
now that the primary piece of physical evidence had been
(03:28):
destroyed by the police. We wanted to know the same thing,
and for the first time in a long time, Melissa
seemed pretty fired up. I guess I'm anxious, but it's
still like we're close to getting somewhere. I'm just ready
to just take off, you know, just take off, run
and just start screaming down the street. You know, who
(03:51):
killed my Son's covering up the murder of my son.
You know, I'm just ready to do whatever um it's
going to take. The St. Louis County Police Department was
asserting that they had sent Melissa a letter telling her
to come and claim the sheet, and that she had
thirty days to do so. They claimed the letter was
(04:13):
sent on January and since Melissa did not retrieve the
sheet within thirty days of that, the property department destroyed it.
Now we will be digging into the details of all
this in a future episode, but we do want to
note that upon learning the sheet was destroyed, we immediately
sent a Sunshine request to the St. Louis County p
D Records Department. We asked for every record they had
(04:36):
relating to evidence in the Danie Jones case, with a
specific ask for anything regarding the bed sheet. We were
quickly sent a reply email that listed the pieces of
evidence in Dania's case. So, just to help you understand this,
each piece of evidence in the case file has its
own evidence receipt, and in Donne's case, the evidence police
(04:57):
had was a blood sample card, a CD with the
recordings of Melissa's and Daniels nine one one calls, and
the bed sheet he was hanged with. However, the rapid
response we got from St. Louis County to our Sunshine
request did not include an evidence receipt for the bed sheet,
which to us was very odd. If the bed sheet
had been destroyed in early March, as the County police
(05:20):
were claiming, then why was the evidence receipt for the
sheet not returned to Danie's case file before June when
we requested it. We would presume that after evidence is destroyed,
the evidence receipt would be promptly returned to the case
file so that any officer who needed to reference the
file would know that that piece of evidence had at
one point existed. So if the sheet was destroyed in
(05:42):
early March, as they claimed, why for over three months
had the evidence receipt not been returned to the case file.
We asked both the Records Department and Information Officers Sergeant
Benjamin Granda to explain this, but neither would give us
an explanation. The destruction of the bedsheet and where it
sent us is going to be the subject of a
(06:03):
future episode. But first there is another pressing set of
developments we need to share. The data extraction company in
Texas where we sent Danye's Android phone succeeded in bypassing
his pass code, and they gave us a whole data
map of the phone's contents. Hi, my name is John Duffy,
and I'm actually an investigative journalist and I'm doing a
(06:25):
story about a young man named Donye Jones, who I
believe you had some real estate dealings with maybe two
years ago. I don't relate, So no, I haven't had
any real estate dealings with somebody. Oh, oh maybe is
he a black gentleman? Yes, okay, yes, I do remember him.
I would tell in a house for my brother in law,
(06:47):
and he was trying to scam He was trying to
scam you. Yes, I'm gonna start off by letting you
know that Danye has has passed away and the circumstances
surrounding his death were mysterious. I got well, I didn't
know that. Yeah, And I got your phone number through
his phone and I just saw text messages between you
(07:10):
and him. Can I have your first name? Do you
mind telling me, Jennifer, Jennifer High, Do you have any
objection to kind of telling me what went down with
him trying to get your house or what that was like? Um, well,
what it was. What it was was we were selling it.
It was just a cash deal. You know. He was
one in twelve thousand for the house. And the guy said, okay,
you know, I'm going to run this through my company,
(07:30):
blah blah blah, And we got to get a title
search done, which will take a couple of days and
then you know, then we'll buy the house or whatever. Well,
a month goes by and he's still not committed. Well,
he's messaging me saying this and saying that, but in actuality,
he was never had any attentions of doing anything about it.
(07:51):
But he said that my brother in law signed a
contract stating that he had a month to do anything
about it and everything. So and then what happened at
the end, Um, we got tired of dealing with him
because he was just he was just bullshitting, is what
he was when you met him in person. Was there
anything you remember about him, anything that stood out or
(08:14):
anything like that? No, not really, Okay, how do you
mean the car and vehicle? Teach Grove didn't look like
he had like straight up cash to purchase houses like
he was talking like he was saying that, you know,
he thought houses all day long and stuff, but he
(08:34):
just didn't look like he had the knowledge or anything
to be doing any of that. What kind of car
did he show up in? Honestly, I don't remember. He
is with a couple of different ones because because his car,
his personal car was Alexis Like, yeah, no, he never
showed up in one of those. What I'm trying to
(08:55):
do is kind of understand his last days is last week's,
his last month's, Like what kind of financial trouble. Maybe
he was in or you know, what things were going right,
what things were going wrong right? But yeah, so no
money ever changed hands or anything like that. No, No,
I mean I'm sorry that he said. I had no
clue like that was those text messages where the last
(09:17):
time we ever had any dealings with him at all? Yeah,
And it was looking at it, it it looked like the
last time you guys had any communication was October second,
and then he uh, he was found dead the morning
of the seventeen, so it was about two weeks later.
Maybe that's why we never hurt from him again. I
don't know. The last thing he writes to you is
(09:38):
I'll contact you in a bit, and that's on October two,
and then you just wrote okay, and that was about noon,
and it looked like you gout he was trying to
come over, like arranged like a time to come over
to look at the house or something, and that was
the last thing that you guys had And I believe
he did. I believe he did come up with that day.
But you we get put him that we were tired
(10:01):
of the backup forth. Do you feel like you maybe remember,
like if the if the last thing he said to
you was still along the lines of don't worry, don't worry,
I'm gonna buy this. Yeah, yeah, basically what he that's
what he kept paying the whole time because because he's
definitely in contact with finance people and other things like that,
and maybe that is why it never happened. Right. One
(10:25):
of the reasons cited by the Medical Examiner's office and
the police for Donya's supposed depression was that his real
estate business wasn't doing well. Now that we had access
to his phone, we did our best to figure out
how well his business was or wasn't doing. But let
us start by reminding you that Danye seemingly started having
(10:46):
an interest in real estate in late summer. To suggest
that the business not doing well only three months later
would be enough to drive Donye to suicide, while plausible,
does require that you believe Danyae now only had very
unrealistic expectations about what he could accomplish in such a
short time, but also that he was taking a large
(11:06):
part of his perception of himself and his self worth
on these expectations, which is a heck of a presumption
to make. We should also note that on his Facebook page.
As a headline, Dana wrote, success is stumbling from failure
to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. We take that
with a grain of salt. Is anyone can write a
(11:27):
motivational headline, It doesn't mean they will live by it,
but it does hint at the notion that Danya was
aware that success wouldn't come overnight and that it wouldn't
come without struggle. His grandmother Gloria said something to this
effect the first time that we met her. The thing
about being suicidal cause of probably not one, because he
(11:49):
told me at times when you show a house doesn't
mean because you show your house that time about buying it,
they're gonna get it. So that's a thing where he
already knew. Dad was already in his head. He knew
that you may have everything of ducks in the role,
as they say, but it may always be in the
way you know what's gonna happen. It takes time and stuff.
And so that to say he was silicidal because of
(12:10):
a house not turning over whatever, that was the furthest one,
the truth. Looking through his phone, we can see that
Donya was a member of several real estate groups on Facebook,
mostly focusing on wholesale real estate and flipping houses. He
was messaging a lot of people, asking a lot of
questions about this or that house, talking numbers, and occasionally
(12:31):
trying to move the conversation forward towards some sort of
contract sale deal. We can see that he was watching
YouTube videos on various elements of the real estate world
and also Google searching for explanations of various terms and concepts.
His Instagram profile shows that he was trying to sell
a few houses over the river in Illinois, in places
(12:52):
like Murphy's Borough and Granite City, and on September five
and six, he posted photos to his Instagram of three
different houses with the word sold photoshopped across them in
large text. Unfortunately, as Dania was diving into the world
of wholesale real estate, he wouldn't necessarily take possession of
these properties himself and might only be facilitating a purchase
(13:15):
between a seller and a different buyer, so no record
at a county office would necessarily signify his involvement, so
he couldn't confirm if these were actual sales or if
Dania was just posting these photos to make it appear
as if he had succeeded in various deals. Hi, my
name is John Duffy. I'm actually I'm a journalist. I'm
working on a story about a young man named Danie
(13:37):
Jones who I think two years ago had some real
estate or attempted real estate dealings with you. Yeah. Oh
so that's the name that I didn't want to ever
hear again. This is Corey. We found a long series
of text between Danya and her in which she was
very angry because apparently on October Danya was supposed to
(14:02):
close on purchasing her house, which he said he would
buy with cash sight unseen, seemingly to flip, but he
never showed up to the closing. I don't know if
you know this, but he's dead and we've been basically
just kind of running down his story. And then in
his phone I found some text messages with you where
you seem pretty upset at him about missing a closing
(14:26):
or something like that. Oh yeah, he was supposedly um
and uh real lettee in Butter and we were trying
to sell her home and he he strung us along
for a really long time and then never even showed
up for the clothing on the on the property and
(14:47):
so we missed several opportunities in the meantime. So that's
really it just seeing our life miserable. So he so
he was telling you he was going to buy your house, yes, okay, Yeah,
and then you guys had that all worked out, You
had the price all worked out and everything. Yeah, we
had all the papers. Yeah, everything was all done, and
(15:10):
then he just never came to finish it. And then
what happened at the end when he didn't when he
didn't come, um, well we tried getting in touch with him,
and we just weren't hearing anything back. He just kind
I goes to this. We ended up finding someone else
and we're able to sell the house pretty quickly after
(15:32):
all that. But yeah, it's just he definitely did not
prevent himself the way that he the way that it
seemed that he really was. He really was not professional,
and it was a very emotional, frustrating time. My dad
had just had four strokes. We besides that, I don't
but I mean, we never even met him. Everything was
(15:53):
just three Like I said, I did give was the
face of passenger. It really standing take that happened to him.
We're opping it's been ruled it's been decided that it
was a suicide officially. Yeah, and it was only thirteen
days after your house closing, or not even like twelve.
He was definitely attempting to be a real estate investor.
And what we've been trying to kind of figure out
(16:15):
is did he owe anybody money? You know? Was he
in the whole that's terrible? Did you know him? I
did not know him. Um. I became aware of his
death shortly after it happened. Because of the circumstances, it
got a little bit of national coverage because of course
you're aware he was a young black man and he
he was hanging in a tree in his mother's backyard
(16:38):
and my mother. It might seem that between Jennifer and
Corey Danya was not exactly doing a great job of
the whole real estate thing. But those were the only
two people we found in all of his contacts and
conversations who were angry with him. So, as far as
we can tell, that's the entire book of evidence on
(17:00):
his business failing. We also spoke to a man named
Wardell who was seemingly working with Don Ye on a deal. Yeah.
The only thing I tell you is that he followed me,
I guess on Facebook and then the investment group and
from there we met. We had a conversations through Facebook
(17:22):
once that we worked on a project or were in
granted City that we were trying to work on together
that fell through. And that's that's all because you guys
were talking. It was right right before he died, So
I know it wasn't like, didn't look like you knew
him for very long. Um, right, but you met him
in you met him in person though, right? Yeah? Yeah,
him in person. I want to say on the incident,
(17:44):
I guess it occurred. I don't know how long after
the fact, but I had just met the guy. He
seemed like he was a really good kid. Did you
feel like he was kind of in over his head
with the real estate stuff? Did you feel like he
had a good mind for it, Like, did you have
an opinion at all? Uh? Yeah, he had an excellent mind. Uh.
He had a real good persona about himself. I liked
(18:07):
his work at the UM. You know, there's a matter
of fact, guys listening to my my kids, I mean,
so you want to make things happen. I mean, here,
what happened with the Granite City property it just it
never went through. I guess the owner didn want to
accept the offer that we worked or was he mostly
trying to do wholesale stuff? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And do
(18:30):
you mind giving me like a really quick and dirty
explanation of what that means because I might think I know,
but I don't know that I know you No. I
mean especially where we try to go in and buy
the property and work on selling to another investor, so
it requires putting some money down. Okay, did you have
(18:50):
any inkling as to whether or not he had other properties,
had monkling whatso? Yeah? But like I was saying, just
as far as arc I was ici and he sings
he knew he was doing. He was hungree to work
the deals. And that's it. Is there anything else you
remember about him that stands out that he was a
(19:11):
good person. He didn't come across his uh you know,
anything was worrying him. He just knew what he wanted,
the same life in life, and he's just hungry. But
Danye's last communications with Bardell that we can see in
his phone occurred on October basically three days before Donye's death,
(19:32):
and in this communication, Donyae is asking Wardell about a
deal on a particular property, and Wardell tells him that
there is a major spread on it and that getting
seventy k is a cake walk. The closing with Corey
that Danielle missed was on October five, so it doesn't
seem as if he has been demotivated by that deal
going bad, as eight days later he's still trying to
(19:55):
hunt down new deals with Wardell. We have to remember
that how what depth Danya was at the real estate game,
or how he may have oversold himself to certain potential sellers,
isn't an issue. His emotional and mental states are what
we care about, and to that there were other things
going on in Donya's life besides trying to break into
(20:16):
the world of buying and selling property. We saw a
bizarre series of texts that we couldn't quite understand, where
he's talking about sending someone money when he gets it
and asking if the person can't just quote turn it
back on in the phone. The number was listed under
the name deal and we wondered if perhaps this person
(20:37):
was in the drug trade, so we called the number
ideal car. I'm a dealer, So you're in Idaho? Are
you in Boise. This is a mod. He's a used
car dealer and he sold Donya his Lexus he bought
Alexis ninth sold the car with the five dollar dumpement
(20:59):
or six d dollar don payment. He said, I'm a
construction work Just anything else you remember about him, I'm
interested in hearing. I meet him a couple of times
because he's coming in grab his car. He was really
quite guy, not talking so much. He's a really cool guy.
Anything he told me straight, told me say, hey, bro,
(21:19):
I don't have money that much this time, I'm gonna
make it this time. I'm gonna get my salary or something. Apparently,
on several occasions, Danie missed making his car payments and
he would call up him on and work it out.
So sometimes he would just miss payments and then he'd
have to kind of deal with you know, wheel and
deal back with you to try to get square. Yeah,
(21:41):
and if he's gonna miss payment or something like that,
you can contact with me saying, hey bro, I am
behind this month or this month something that I'm working
on it. I'm not that kind of greedy. Said no,
bring the car but back for me or not gonna
go Chase about to get the car. Did you feel
that he was honest? She wasn't honests so he wasn't
(22:02):
too bad to work with. No, he wasn't. He wasn't.
And you you kind of probably deal with this a
lot people just kind of oh yeah, that's a worse
than the people people lying. Most people that say, oh,
turn off my car, turn on my car, I'm gonna
I'm gonna give you this much money or something something,
never show up. Call me back, then I'm going to
(22:22):
shut down the car back. Ahmad had to kill switch
installed in the cars that he sold that was fixed
to a GPS system, so if people who bought cars
from him on credit missed their payments, he could shut
off their cars remotely. His last text messages with you
were around like October eighth, ninth tenth. Did you have
his car turned off at that time? How do you
(22:42):
turn the car off? Can you just explain that to me?
When you sold the car on the payment? Does the
GPS install on the system when the payment? Now, bring
it on. We're gonna go to the system. When he
turned him off, the car completely shut down, like a
key is lost until I'm going to turn on back
to from the computer, So this explains Danye's car being
(23:05):
down the week he died. We can see in the
texts with a mod that not only did he turn
off the car awaiting four hundred and thirty six dollars
and sixty four cents from Dnya, but Donya was also
claiming that there were issues with the battery and the radiator.
Looking through Danye's YouTube history, we see that he watched
several videos on how to remove a GPS kill switch
(23:27):
from a car, and we kind of glossed over it,
but it's probably a good time to focus on the
fact that, yes, Danye bought the car in Boise, Idaho.
In Dane took off from St. Louis and moved to Colorado,
where he lived and worked briefly before moving to Boise.
Looking at his Google location data, we can see that
(23:49):
he actually drove all the way to the Puget Sound
area of Washington State before circling back to Colorado. Militia
and Danya's grandmother Gloria told us what they knew about
Danye's time living in Boise. Everything is so beautiful I
kind of overlooked, but the things he was pulled over
so many times. He had a decent car. He had
(24:10):
a nice job, decent car, and because of it, they
was calling him. Um uh. He kept saying, Grandma, he said,
I'm gonna I'm gonna get you a plane ticket. I
want you to see the scenery. It may be a
lot of racist things going on, he said, but Grandma,
the scene is so pretty. It's so peaceful. He said. Yeah.
(24:32):
They pulled me over every time they get a chance
to make sure everything is correct my car. They asked him,
what you know, what is a you're doing driving a
car like this? It was the Lexus. It was just
continuously they pulled him over, continuously, call my name and everything.
But he just thought about the peaceful how pretty is that.
(24:52):
He really wanted to make sure you gonna pay for
your flight to come here and you could just see
the mountains in the areas and see pretty. Danya told
his family members that while living in Boise, he was
frequently pulled over while driving in his new Lexus. After
digging through a lot of court records, we were able
to find that Dania was arrested in August for possession
(25:16):
of marijuana and paraphernalia in Boise. Over the following months,
Donia would be assigned a public defender and even spend
nine days in jail for a failure to appear. The
records show a lot of back and forth, a lot
of resetting of dates, missed dates, etcetera. It's all kind
of boring, but the long and short of it is
the case was eventually dismissed. When he lived, he didn't
(25:38):
tail no one. He just lives. This is deja again.
She says that when Donna moved west, he didn't tell
anybody he was going. One day, he just packed up
and drove off. Melissa once told us that Donia went
to Colorado because weed was legal there. What drew him
north to Idaho is sort of a mystery. He tried
(26:00):
to convince not only his grandmother to visit, but seemingly
he even tried to convince Desa to move there to
be with him. He had reached out for me, I
think on Facebook. Then you just tell me how he's
doing through it out of town, working for some construction
place where he was painting and basically refurbishing places. And
(26:23):
I was like, okay, that's real good. And he was
trying to get me to come down there, and I
was just like, oh, I don't know about that one.
My daughter. Yeah, he wanted me to come down there
with him, and then was just like no, not right now.
He's like, well, he's gonna come to busy. When he
got close to my birthday, he ordered to come down
for my birthday. So he came down. I was shocked.
(26:46):
I'm like, you actually here. So we hung out my birthday.
He got a hotel and just shoot. That's when I
told him, like, I don't got my place anymore. So
he was just like, okay, well, you know, you just
go to his brain. How bout to my mom's house.
So he went to his mom and every day you
complete me ll take me to work or take me
(27:08):
wherever I needed to go. Deja's birthday is August seven,
so around this time, Danie was back in St. Louis
with his new Lexus and he moved in with his
mother and stepfather, where he slept on a couch in
the basement. He started talking to his uncle Daniel about
getting into real estate, and by everything we saw in
his phone data, he was very focused on this pursuit,
(27:29):
though he did do other work for money, including being
signed up for attempt service and Deja says she is
hanging out with Dna from that point on regularly, with
him picking her up and driving her to work daily.
Going through his phone, we found a few more interesting
pieces of information surrounding Danya's last day alive. For one,
Dania had been messaging with his younger brother Javan over
(27:51):
the course of the preceding week about his car needing
a new battery, and also about wanting a job application
for the call center where Javon worked. On the morning
of the sixteen, Javon asks Done if he has gotten
the new car battery yet, and don Yae answers that
he hasn't. At two twenty nine in the afternoon, don
Ye asked Javan how much a battery will cost. Then,
(28:13):
at nine thirty four pm, Danye text Javan, I've been
asking for your help, but forget it. Javon responds to
this at ten o nine pm, saying, what do you mean?
You only asked me about the app and the battery.
This back and forth seems to add another layer to
the text Dnye sent to Militia at ninety five pm
that says sorry sis. The text the police and the
(28:36):
pathologist interpreted as a final goodbye, dan Ye appears piste
off at Javan and seems to be admonishing his younger
brother for having ignored him, And that makes us wonder
if Danye's text to Militia, which he would write exactly
twenty one seconds later, really was an apology for his
having ignored her when she was over at the house
(28:57):
that day. As Militia believes, it seems to make perfect sense.
Dania is trying to get his brother's attention and his
brother isn't responding fast enough. Maybe a lightbulb clicks on
and Donia realizes a crap here. I am mad at
my brother for ignoring me, but I ignored my sister
and her son when they came over. I should tell
her I'm sorry. Danye never sent anything else after Javon's
(29:21):
final texts at ten ten pm, possibly because he was
outside of WiFi range and never saw them. There was
something else in the phone that we needed to ask
Javan about. The Google location data from Dania's phone is
hard to decipher as it is just blue lines on
a map, and as his phone had no cell service,
his movement was only tracked when the phone was logged
(29:43):
into WiFi, which for the time period in question was
only when Danya was at or near his house. We
do see for the sixteenth movement around the house, and
movement that seems to indicate that Danya headed south, perhaps
only a few houses down, perhaps further if the signal
cut out. We wondered if perhaps Danyae knew somebody in
the neighborhood whose house he could walk to, So we
(30:05):
called Javan and asked him about it. No, I do know.
We had a playing to rio the stay we'll see.
I think his family he stayed in the house. I
don't think he stay as he lived in the house
not I think they was right on to the to
live going towards that day and our Francia went to school,
he had stayed down there. Rich Trell is somebody that
(30:29):
Donya had gone to school with and had remained friends
with over the years. Melissa refers to him as Danna's
smoking buddy. We can see in Danyae's text record that
Treill reached out to Donye on the sixteenth at two
forty three pm to say new pressure on deck tennan
gee and unplugging. This was followed by a series of emojis,
(30:49):
one of a tree, a gas tank, a rocket, and
a face with smoke coming out of the mouth. So
Trell is saying he has new weed available for sale.
This seemed like an incredible lead. A friend within walking
distance who was staying in the direction that Danye's movement
data suggested he traveled, and who would hit Danyae up
that afternoon to let him know he had good new weed.
(31:11):
So we called Treill right across the trains as the
house ripe for him. So the last house he lived
in was about seven houses away from the house you
were in. Ye stay right at the corner house. According
to Treill, he had stayed at various houses in the
neighborhood as he had various family members there, but at
(31:33):
the time of Danye's death, he was staying in a
house to the south of Melissa's and to the east,
just over the railroad tracks behind her yard. This would
align with the movement data we see on Danyae's phone.
We asked Trell when he saw Donna last. So his
last his last day was the sit was the sixteen,
So you're thinking probably about something like that is when
(31:56):
you saw him. It was about a couple days before
before everything he had, he was in our spirits and
so at first. Trell says he saw Danyae a couple
of days before him. We told Treille we saw the
text he sent Danyae about having new weed for sale,
(32:17):
and since we didn't see Danya respond to that message,
we asked if Danyae just popped by, or if he
ever just stopped over and announced, I ain't popped up
at my house. He wouldn't he went to Pomlo type.
You know, I always informed me that he was because
I did he call you in that day at night
(32:42):
he was working on the car right outside that you
know about what time? Yeah, and it had all up
in the car. I said, boy, you black black and
it's not paying at surrounds. According to Trell, he had
hung out with Donya a couple of days before his death.
(33:04):
He saw Danya on the sixteenth out on the street
working on his car, roughly in mid afternoon, roughly around
the same time he texted him about having the weed.
Did danye ever respond to your October sixteen? You know,
I got all types of gas on deck text? He
didn't read, no, miss said until before he opened he
opened up that new presson on date on the six
(33:25):
think he never opened had missed. It was odd that
Trell told us the last time he saw Donya was
a couple of days before he died, and then went
on to say he saw him that afternoon on the street.
But perhaps he means that was the last time he
hung out with Danye and not just saw him in passing.
It was so frustrating that this promising lead seemed to
be a dead end. But back in Danyae's phone, we
(33:48):
find that there is around September thirt some sort of
mysterious event that has Danye quite upset and possibly seeking revenge.
This is evidenced by text to three different numbers. The
first is a singular text he sent to a number
stating plainly, I found out where dude stay at. The
next is a text he sends to a friend of
(34:09):
his who lives about three and a half hours drive
west in Springfield, Missouri, my Shianna. He tells her, been good,
a lot of bs, though everybody getting jammed up, m
f getting popped in a bit. I'll probably need to
duck off for a week there. And finally, there is
a series of texts he sends to Deja, the first
of which reads, Marcel three dark skin, I found out
(34:31):
where he stayed. Delete this after you got it. Note
Danye gave Marcell's full name, but we were withholding it
because the accusation against him is pretty heavy and has
not been proven in a court of law. Deja replied,
I got you. Danya then sent Deja pictures which we
cannot see but presumably contain Marcel's image. She asks who
(34:52):
on the first picture, so perhaps the pictures contain several
different people. The next day, Dane asks Asia, can you
have your people's line it up? We never see a
definitive end of this conversation. On September sixteenth, we see
that Danya and Deja had a video chat, and we
also see that before the first text in the series
(35:13):
was sent, at ten twenty am, Danye called Deja, So
the whole thing where he names Marcel and sends photos
of him and asked for people can line something up,
and she says, I got you had some greater context
that now only Deja knows, but it's pretty obvious. Danya
is angry about a recent event. He wants Stage's help
(35:33):
addressing it, and he thinks he may need to go
hide out in Springfield. We asked Melissa if she knew
who Marcel was him that's the one that shot at
Javon in Um. Danye's best friend, Damon was seemingly hanging
out with Danya's younger brother Javon on September twelve, when
(35:57):
Damon was shot four times agedly by Marcel. The alleged
amotive for this shooting was that javan and Damon had
recently hung out with Marcelle's girlfriend and she had posted
something of this hangout on Snapchat. He seems very mad
about he was Danyae and I. We went to the hospital.
They only let him go in and see him. He
(36:19):
came back out he was so I told him, I said, listen,
you have to let the police handle this. You know,
the police is not going to do anything. He said,
they could have killed my brother. And I told Givanne
to go and talk to the police about it, and
me and Danyelle got into it because Danyelle said that
(36:40):
if Givonne goes to the police, then they can come
back and kill Givann and I said, well, I just
need you to stay out of it. Melissa also thought
Danye was probably asking Deja in those texts for help
getting a gun. So you're you're thinking that him talking
to Deja about this this can your people line it up?
(37:02):
He's trying to get a gun through her to Danye
hope to get a gun so he could exact revenge
against Marcel. Is that why he thought he might need
to lay up in Springfield? Or was it something else,
perhaps trying to arrange for other people to do the
dirty work. I mean, this is speculation, but do you
(37:24):
think Danye would do something so far as like try
to arrange to get Marcel hurt? Danye would do it himself.
He would do it himself. Um, when it comes to
his family. That's what this is what I'm saying. He
did not play about us that and when I say
he was like my protector, he was my protector, our protectives.
(37:48):
He he did not play when if someone came after us.
Danyae's protective nature is a large part of the reason
Melissa does not leave. He would have ended his own life.
But as far as these texts are concerned, again, only
Deja knows for sure what Danya was asking for. In
(38:11):
episode six, Deja told us Danyae and Melissa had been
fighting before he died. This whole series of events, Damon
and Javon being shot at, and Donna wanting to seek retribution.
It's what that fight was about. By September nineteenth, a
week after the shooting, Melissa says police had Marcel and custody.
(38:31):
She had a long text conversation about it with Dania,
which boiled down to the fact that Dania didn't want
anyone to snitch because he believed that would be traced
back to Javon and then Javon would be targeted. He
told Melissa the Marcel problem was going to be handled
at the street level. Here she is reading part of
this text chain. The stress was going to take care
(38:55):
of that. He knows a lot of people. I said,
the streets was gonna take care of him when after
somebody else is killed. So he says, that's what I'm saying,
And the first people they will look at is Givonne.
So what he was saying was he didn't want Givonne
(39:16):
to be implicated on anything till he said, tell Givonne
to get a gun, is all I'm saying. After that,
me and him, we had our words and got into it.
That's when we got into it and he left. That
we can tell based on a record search, this Marcelle
person never was charged for shooting at Damon and Gavan.
(39:37):
Stop for a moment and think about this timeline of
events from Melissa's point of view. In August of Melissa
aids a stranger KWin after he is shot on West
Flores Saint Avenue. The next month, in September, her son
Givann is shot at while hanging out with her other
son's best friend, Damon. Then in October, Manya has found
(40:00):
hanged in Melissa's backyard. This woman knew four young black
men who were the victims of fatal or near fatal
violence over the course of three months, two of whom
were her own sons, and none of whose cases seemingly
received a satisfactory investigation. Neither Damon nor Javon wanted to
(40:23):
talk to us much about Marcel or the shooting. We
couldn't help, but wonder if Marcel was at least part
of the reason Dania seemed so anxious and maybe paranoid
in his last week or so of life. Danye's phone
was really a treasure trove of information, and there's no
way to possibly cover everything that we found. A quick note,
(40:45):
we found absolutely zero hint that Dania was interested in
men sexually in any of his data. In fact, quite
the opposite. He seemed very interested in women. So anyone
with lingering thoughts that perhaps a hidden homosexuality was secretly
eating at him, just no, there's no real smoke there.
In fact, searching his phone data, we found nothing that
(41:08):
hinted at depression or suicidal ideation in his texts, nothing
in his email, and nothing in his Google searches. Yes,
he had some struggles real estate deals that didn't work out,
in a car that needed attention, in a late payment
that was keeping it from operating. But remember back in
episode five we talked about how Donier was reconnecting with
(41:30):
his ex girlfriend Loretha. Unlocking his phone is how we
know that they texted back and forth. On the fifteenth
of October, after seven pm, they had a long conversation
in which Dane told Loretha he was getting his business
up and running, and she said that was exciting. She
said both of their birthdays were coming up in the
(41:50):
next month, so he asked her what she wanted, and
she answered that she wanted perfume and a promise ring.
She said she wanted to hear all about his business
and so jested that they go to a restaurant that weekend,
to which Danya said that sounds good, and she said okay.
The next morning, on what would ultimately be the last
(42:11):
full day of Danie's life, at about ten am, he
texted Loretha, good morning, beautiful. We don't know if he
called her that day or if she called him, so
the phone didn't ultimately reveal if Loresa is who Danya
went to see the night he died, but clearly he
had things to look forward to. There was only one
thing and the whole phone that pointed to Danya having
(42:34):
suicidal intent, and when we found it, it hit us hard,
very hard. We went into his YouTube searches and there's
like twenty searches. I'm going down and I'm finding everything
you expect. Music, it was a car, stuff, real estate,
and then there's a search for a very specific phrase,
(42:57):
which is how to tie the hangman's and was a blanket.
Looking into someone's phone data is an eerie modern proxy
for looking into their minds. Seeing photos DNA took from
his cross country journey, hearing the music he liked knowing
(43:18):
which games he liked to play. It all helped us
feel strangely close to him. There was a video in
his Google drive in which he's sitting with some friends
and as music plays in the background, he's smoking a
hookah and blowing smoke rings quite well. When a young
woman goes to blow smoke rings herself, Danya imitates her,
(43:39):
making good natured fun of her, mocking her face. Everybody
in the room is cracking up, laughing. There he was.
Everyone who knew Danyae well told us he was so
funny and silly, and now we can see that it
was true he was. We'd play it here if it
weren't for the fact that the comedy is so purely physical.
(44:00):
There isn't much to hear other than the room laughing hysterically.
In response a phone full of texts and posts and
search history that all seemed normal and healthy, but for
this one YouTube search how to tie a hangman's noose
with a blanket, searched for on October six, the last
(44:20):
day of his life. Upon finding it, we thought, this
is it. The clue we've been looking for, the piece
of evidence that tips the scale of certainty in one
clear direction. Or does it That's next time and After
the Uprising? After the Uprising is directed, produced, investigated, written
(44:44):
and reported by myself, Raino the Shell Ski and John Duffy.
John Duffy was also the editor. Dave Cassidy was producer,
sound engineering, design and mixed by Josh Condon. Executive producers
were Matt McDonough and Tina x Ros for Now This,
Brett Kushner for Group nine Media, and Jess bore of
A is executive in charge of production. Jonathan Hartwig and
Bradley Rayford were consulting producers. Eliza Craig was assistant producer
(45:06):
and did additional reporting. Mallory Keenoy was a writer's assistant.
Kristin McVicker and Taya Wilson were production assistants, and Haley
Klesmer was a post production assistant. Fact checking by Alison Humes.
Theme song and other music by Zachary Walter, legal by
Keith Sklar and Peter Yazy. Special thanks to Ann Frado,
Danny Gonzalez, Barbara Copple, Alex Lester, Bethan Macaluzo, Emily Maronoff,
(45:27):
Ruth Vaka, and the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After The Uprising is a production of Double asterisk I
Heart Media and now this in association with True Stories.
You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. If you
have useful information about the death of Danye Jones or
anything we've covered, please leave a message on our tip
line at three four seven six seven four seven four
zero one.
Content warning. This podcast discusses violence, murder, suicide, civil unrest,
aggressive policing, racism, and lynching. If you or anyone you
know is considering suicide, her self harm, or just need
to talk about problems, please call the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline to seven three to five or text the Crisis
(00:26):
text line at seven four one. Previously and after the uprising,
did he seem excited about going on that night? Danny
said he did. It's my brother, he said he did.
I saw leave out the door last night because I
was sitting in kids. Do you know about what time?
That was? About nine o'clock? Not? He needn't leave in
(00:49):
a car does things as well? His calls out, so
there's no sheet. Un If this happens to your child,
would you want to get down to the bottom of
this and find out what really happened? You might know
the pass code to Danye's phone? Is that true? I
have a might be. No one guy has followed open,
(01:12):
no one has gotten his phone open yet this is
a disease person's phone. Correct. I wish I had a
clearer answer for you. A lot of these phones that
have a Qualcom chip set usually give me an option
to bypass the pass code, but I never have luck
with them and not too hopefull on it. What you're
(01:39):
looking at is the aftermath of the grand jury deciding
not to indict Officer Wilson. A young man found hanging
from a tree in October. His mom believes someone murdered
(01:59):
her son targeting him. Danye became an activist in the
wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown by a
white police officer. That's why Melissa mckinne's wants St. Louis
County police to dig deeper to her son's death. He
was not suicidal. This is after the uprising, the death
(02:22):
of Donye Dion Jones. I don't know if she told
you about what they did with the evidence. They destroyed it.
There was they destroyed it after we do that we
(02:43):
was having a private investigation and that we needed that
they destroyed it. That's enough of it. This is okay,
so okay for it's all Jack, Okay, It's what it's about.
Horrible investigation and it looks it looks suspect on every level.
So now what are you doing? What were you doing?
(03:06):
That was Melissa speaking with retired University City Municipal Police
Commander Captain Carol Jackson again. After learning details about the
investigation into Danie's death. Captain Jackson expressed her opinion that
it sounded rather substandard and she wanted to know what
Melissa was going to do to continue to move forward
now that the primary piece of physical evidence had been
(03:28):
destroyed by the police. We wanted to know the same thing,
and for the first time in a long time, Melissa
seemed pretty fired up. I guess I'm anxious, but it's
still like we're close to getting somewhere. I'm just ready
to just take off, you know, just take off, run
and just start screaming down the street. You know, who
(03:51):
killed my Son's covering up the murder of my son.
You know, I'm just ready to do whatever um it's
going to take. The St. Louis County Police Department was
asserting that they had sent Melissa a letter telling her
to come and claim the sheet, and that she had
thirty days to do so. They claimed the letter was
(04:13):
sent on January and since Melissa did not retrieve the
sheet within thirty days of that, the property department destroyed it.
Now we will be digging into the details of all
this in a future episode, but we do want to
note that upon learning the sheet was destroyed, we immediately
sent a Sunshine request to the St. Louis County p
D Records Department. We asked for every record they had
(04:36):
relating to evidence in the Danie Jones case, with a
specific ask for anything regarding the bed sheet. We were
quickly sent a reply email that listed the pieces of
evidence in Dania's case. So, just to help you understand this,
each piece of evidence in the case file has its
own evidence receipt, and in Donne's case, the evidence police
(04:57):
had was a blood sample card, a CD with the
recordings of Melissa's and Daniels nine one one calls, and
the bed sheet he was hanged with. However, the rapid
response we got from St. Louis County to our Sunshine
request did not include an evidence receipt for the bed sheet,
which to us was very odd. If the bed sheet
had been destroyed in early March, as the County police
(05:20):
were claiming, then why was the evidence receipt for the
sheet not returned to Danie's case file before June when
we requested it. We would presume that after evidence is destroyed,
the evidence receipt would be promptly returned to the case
file so that any officer who needed to reference the
file would know that that piece of evidence had at
one point existed. So if the sheet was destroyed in
(05:42):
early March, as they claimed, why for over three months
had the evidence receipt not been returned to the case file.
We asked both the Records Department and Information Officers Sergeant
Benjamin Granda to explain this, but neither would give us
an explanation. The destruction of the bedsheet and where it
sent us is going to be the subject of a
(06:03):
future episode. But first there is another pressing set of
developments we need to share. The data extraction company in
Texas where we sent Danye's Android phone succeeded in bypassing
his pass code, and they gave us a whole data
map of the phone's contents. Hi, my name is John Duffy,
and I'm actually an investigative journalist and I'm doing a
(06:25):
story about a young man named Donye Jones, who I
believe you had some real estate dealings with maybe two
years ago. I don't relate, So no, I haven't had
any real estate dealings with somebody. Oh, oh maybe is
he a black gentleman? Yes, okay, yes, I do remember him.
I would tell in a house for my brother in law,
(06:47):
and he was trying to scam He was trying to
scam you. Yes, I'm gonna start off by letting you
know that Danye has has passed away and the circumstances
surrounding his death were mysterious. I got well, I didn't
know that. Yeah, And I got your phone number through
his phone and I just saw text messages between you
(07:10):
and him. Can I have your first name? Do you
mind telling me, Jennifer, Jennifer High, Do you have any
objection to kind of telling me what went down with
him trying to get your house or what that was like? Um, well,
what it was. What it was was we were selling it.
It was just a cash deal. You know. He was
one in twelve thousand for the house. And the guy said, okay,
you know, I'm going to run this through my company,
(07:30):
blah blah blah, And we got to get a title
search done, which will take a couple of days and
then you know, then we'll buy the house or whatever. Well,
a month goes by and he's still not committed. Well,
he's messaging me saying this and saying that, but in actuality,
he was never had any attentions of doing anything about it.
(07:51):
But he said that my brother in law signed a
contract stating that he had a month to do anything
about it and everything. So and then what happened at
the end, Um, we got tired of dealing with him
because he was just he was just bullshitting, is what
he was when you met him in person. Was there
anything you remember about him, anything that stood out or
(08:14):
anything like that? No, not really, Okay, how do you
mean the car and vehicle? Teach Grove didn't look like
he had like straight up cash to purchase houses like
he was talking like he was saying that, you know,
he thought houses all day long and stuff, but he
(08:34):
just didn't look like he had the knowledge or anything
to be doing any of that. What kind of car
did he show up in? Honestly, I don't remember. He
is with a couple of different ones because because his car,
his personal car was Alexis Like, yeah, no, he never
showed up in one of those. What I'm trying to
(08:55):
do is kind of understand his last days is last week's,
his last month's, Like what kind of financial trouble. Maybe
he was in or you know, what things were going right,
what things were going wrong right? But yeah, so no
money ever changed hands or anything like that. No, No,
I mean I'm sorry that he said. I had no
clue like that was those text messages where the last
(09:17):
time we ever had any dealings with him at all? Yeah,
And it was looking at it, it it looked like the
last time you guys had any communication was October second,
and then he uh, he was found dead the morning
of the seventeen, so it was about two weeks later.
Maybe that's why we never hurt from him again. I
don't know. The last thing he writes to you is
(09:38):
I'll contact you in a bit, and that's on October two,
and then you just wrote okay, and that was about noon,
and it looked like you gout he was trying to
come over, like arranged like a time to come over
to look at the house or something, and that was
the last thing that you guys had And I believe
he did. I believe he did come up with that day.
But you we get put him that we were tired
(10:01):
of the backup forth. Do you feel like you maybe remember,
like if the if the last thing he said to
you was still along the lines of don't worry, don't worry,
I'm gonna buy this. Yeah, yeah, basically what he that's
what he kept paying the whole time because because he's
definitely in contact with finance people and other things like that,
and maybe that is why it never happened. Right. One
(10:25):
of the reasons cited by the Medical Examiner's office and
the police for Donya's supposed depression was that his real
estate business wasn't doing well. Now that we had access
to his phone, we did our best to figure out
how well his business was or wasn't doing. But let
us start by reminding you that Danye seemingly started having
(10:46):
an interest in real estate in late summer. To suggest
that the business not doing well only three months later
would be enough to drive Donye to suicide, while plausible,
does require that you believe Danyae now only had very
unrealistic expectations about what he could accomplish in such a
short time, but also that he was taking a large
(11:06):
part of his perception of himself and his self worth
on these expectations, which is a heck of a presumption
to make. We should also note that on his Facebook page.
As a headline, Dana wrote, success is stumbling from failure
to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. We take that
with a grain of salt. Is anyone can write a
(11:27):
motivational headline, It doesn't mean they will live by it,
but it does hint at the notion that Danya was
aware that success wouldn't come overnight and that it wouldn't
come without struggle. His grandmother Gloria said something to this
effect the first time that we met her. The thing
about being suicidal cause of probably not one, because he
(11:49):
told me at times when you show a house doesn't
mean because you show your house that time about buying it,
they're gonna get it. So that's a thing where he
already knew. Dad was already in his head. He knew
that you may have everything of ducks in the role,
as they say, but it may always be in the
way you know what's gonna happen. It takes time and stuff.
And so that to say he was silicidal because of
(12:10):
a house not turning over whatever, that was the furthest one,
the truth. Looking through his phone, we can see that
Donya was a member of several real estate groups on Facebook,
mostly focusing on wholesale real estate and flipping houses. He
was messaging a lot of people, asking a lot of
questions about this or that house, talking numbers, and occasionally
(12:31):
trying to move the conversation forward towards some sort of
contract sale deal. We can see that he was watching
YouTube videos on various elements of the real estate world
and also Google searching for explanations of various terms and concepts.
His Instagram profile shows that he was trying to sell
a few houses over the river in Illinois, in places
(12:52):
like Murphy's Borough and Granite City, and on September five
and six, he posted photos to his Instagram of three
different houses with the word sold photoshopped across them in
large text. Unfortunately, as Dania was diving into the world
of wholesale real estate, he wouldn't necessarily take possession of
these properties himself and might only be facilitating a purchase
(13:15):
between a seller and a different buyer, so no record
at a county office would necessarily signify his involvement, so
he couldn't confirm if these were actual sales or if
Dania was just posting these photos to make it appear
as if he had succeeded in various deals. Hi, my
name is John Duffy. I'm actually I'm a journalist. I'm
working on a story about a young man named Danie
(13:37):
Jones who I think two years ago had some real
estate or attempted real estate dealings with you. Yeah. Oh
so that's the name that I didn't want to ever
hear again. This is Corey. We found a long series
of text between Danya and her in which she was
very angry because apparently on October Danya was supposed to
(14:02):
close on purchasing her house, which he said he would
buy with cash sight unseen, seemingly to flip, but he
never showed up to the closing. I don't know if
you know this, but he's dead and we've been basically
just kind of running down his story. And then in
his phone I found some text messages with you where
you seem pretty upset at him about missing a closing
(14:26):
or something like that. Oh yeah, he was supposedly um
and uh real lettee in Butter and we were trying
to sell her home and he he strung us along
for a really long time and then never even showed
up for the clothing on the on the property and
(14:47):
so we missed several opportunities in the meantime. So that's
really it just seeing our life miserable. So he so
he was telling you he was going to buy your house, yes, okay, Yeah,
and then you guys had that all worked out, You
had the price all worked out and everything. Yeah, we
had all the papers. Yeah, everything was all done, and
(15:10):
then he just never came to finish it. And then
what happened at the end when he didn't when he
didn't come, um, well we tried getting in touch with him,
and we just weren't hearing anything back. He just kind
I goes to this. We ended up finding someone else
and we're able to sell the house pretty quickly after
(15:32):
all that. But yeah, it's just he definitely did not
prevent himself the way that he the way that it
seemed that he really was. He really was not professional,
and it was a very emotional, frustrating time. My dad
had just had four strokes. We besides that, I don't
but I mean, we never even met him. Everything was
(15:53):
just three Like I said, I did give was the
face of passenger. It really standing take that happened to him.
We're opping it's been ruled it's been decided that it
was a suicide officially. Yeah, and it was only thirteen
days after your house closing, or not even like twelve.
He was definitely attempting to be a real estate investor.
And what we've been trying to kind of figure out
(16:15):
is did he owe anybody money? You know? Was he
in the whole that's terrible? Did you know him? I
did not know him. Um. I became aware of his
death shortly after it happened. Because of the circumstances, it
got a little bit of national coverage because of course
you're aware he was a young black man and he
he was hanging in a tree in his mother's backyard
(16:38):
and my mother. It might seem that between Jennifer and
Corey Danya was not exactly doing a great job of
the whole real estate thing. But those were the only
two people we found in all of his contacts and
conversations who were angry with him. So, as far as
we can tell, that's the entire book of evidence on
(17:00):
his business failing. We also spoke to a man named
Wardell who was seemingly working with Don Ye on a deal. Yeah.
The only thing I tell you is that he followed me,
I guess on Facebook and then the investment group and
from there we met. We had a conversations through Facebook
(17:22):
once that we worked on a project or were in
granted City that we were trying to work on together
that fell through. And that's that's all because you guys
were talking. It was right right before he died, So
I know it wasn't like, didn't look like you knew
him for very long. Um, right, but you met him
in you met him in person though, right? Yeah? Yeah,
him in person. I want to say on the incident,
(17:44):
I guess it occurred. I don't know how long after
the fact, but I had just met the guy. He
seemed like he was a really good kid. Did you
feel like he was kind of in over his head
with the real estate stuff? Did you feel like he
had a good mind for it, Like, did you have
an opinion at all? Uh? Yeah, he had an excellent mind. Uh.
He had a real good persona about himself. I liked
(18:07):
his work at the UM. You know, there's a matter
of fact, guys listening to my my kids, I mean,
so you want to make things happen. I mean, here,
what happened with the Granite City property it just it
never went through. I guess the owner didn want to
accept the offer that we worked or was he mostly
trying to do wholesale stuff? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And do
(18:30):
you mind giving me like a really quick and dirty
explanation of what that means because I might think I know,
but I don't know that I know you No. I
mean especially where we try to go in and buy
the property and work on selling to another investor, so
it requires putting some money down. Okay, did you have
(18:50):
any inkling as to whether or not he had other properties,
had monkling whatso? Yeah? But like I was saying, just
as far as arc I was ici and he sings
he knew he was doing. He was hungree to work
the deals. And that's it. Is there anything else you
remember about him that stands out that he was a
(19:11):
good person. He didn't come across his uh you know,
anything was worrying him. He just knew what he wanted,
the same life in life, and he's just hungry. But
Danye's last communications with Bardell that we can see in
his phone occurred on October basically three days before Donye's death,
(19:32):
and in this communication, Donyae is asking Wardell about a
deal on a particular property, and Wardell tells him that
there is a major spread on it and that getting
seventy k is a cake walk. The closing with Corey
that Danielle missed was on October five, so it doesn't
seem as if he has been demotivated by that deal
going bad, as eight days later he's still trying to
(19:55):
hunt down new deals with Wardell. We have to remember
that how what depth Danya was at the real estate game,
or how he may have oversold himself to certain potential sellers,
isn't an issue. His emotional and mental states are what
we care about, and to that there were other things
going on in Donya's life besides trying to break into
(20:16):
the world of buying and selling property. We saw a
bizarre series of texts that we couldn't quite understand, where
he's talking about sending someone money when he gets it
and asking if the person can't just quote turn it
back on in the phone. The number was listed under
the name deal and we wondered if perhaps this person
(20:37):
was in the drug trade, so we called the number
ideal car. I'm a dealer, So you're in Idaho? Are
you in Boise. This is a mod. He's a used
car dealer and he sold Donya his Lexus he bought
Alexis ninth sold the car with the five dollar dumpement
(20:59):
or six d dollar don payment. He said, I'm a
construction work Just anything else you remember about him, I'm
interested in hearing. I meet him a couple of times
because he's coming in grab his car. He was really
quite guy, not talking so much. He's a really cool guy.
Anything he told me straight, told me say, hey, bro,
(21:19):
I don't have money that much this time, I'm gonna
make it this time. I'm gonna get my salary or something. Apparently,
on several occasions, Danie missed making his car payments and
he would call up him on and work it out.
So sometimes he would just miss payments and then he'd
have to kind of deal with you know, wheel and
deal back with you to try to get square. Yeah,
(21:41):
and if he's gonna miss payment or something like that,
you can contact with me saying, hey bro, I am
behind this month or this month something that I'm working
on it. I'm not that kind of greedy. Said no,
bring the car but back for me or not gonna
go Chase about to get the car. Did you feel
that he was honest? She wasn't honests so he wasn't
(22:02):
too bad to work with. No, he wasn't. He wasn't.
And you you kind of probably deal with this a
lot people just kind of oh yeah, that's a worse
than the people people lying. Most people that say, oh,
turn off my car, turn on my car, I'm gonna
I'm gonna give you this much money or something something,
never show up. Call me back, then I'm going to
(22:22):
shut down the car back. Ahmad had to kill switch
installed in the cars that he sold that was fixed
to a GPS system, so if people who bought cars
from him on credit missed their payments, he could shut
off their cars remotely. His last text messages with you
were around like October eighth, ninth tenth. Did you have
his car turned off at that time? How do you
(22:42):
turn the car off? Can you just explain that to me?
When you sold the car on the payment? Does the
GPS install on the system when the payment? Now, bring
it on. We're gonna go to the system. When he
turned him off, the car completely shut down, like a
key is lost until I'm going to turn on back
to from the computer, So this explains Danye's car being
(23:05):
down the week he died. We can see in the
texts with a mod that not only did he turn
off the car awaiting four hundred and thirty six dollars
and sixty four cents from Dnya, but Donya was also
claiming that there were issues with the battery and the radiator.
Looking through Danye's YouTube history, we see that he watched
several videos on how to remove a GPS kill switch
(23:27):
from a car, and we kind of glossed over it,
but it's probably a good time to focus on the
fact that, yes, Danye bought the car in Boise, Idaho.
In Dane took off from St. Louis and moved to Colorado,
where he lived and worked briefly before moving to Boise.
Looking at his Google location data, we can see that
(23:49):
he actually drove all the way to the Puget Sound
area of Washington State before circling back to Colorado. Militia
and Danya's grandmother Gloria told us what they knew about
Danye's time living in Boise. Everything is so beautiful I
kind of overlooked, but the things he was pulled over
so many times. He had a decent car. He had
(24:10):
a nice job, decent car, and because of it, they
was calling him. Um uh. He kept saying, Grandma, he said,
I'm gonna I'm gonna get you a plane ticket. I
want you to see the scenery. It may be a
lot of racist things going on, he said, but Grandma,
the scene is so pretty. It's so peaceful. He said. Yeah.
(24:32):
They pulled me over every time they get a chance
to make sure everything is correct my car. They asked him,
what you know, what is a you're doing driving a
car like this? It was the Lexus. It was just
continuously they pulled him over, continuously, call my name and everything.
But he just thought about the peaceful how pretty is that.
(24:52):
He really wanted to make sure you gonna pay for
your flight to come here and you could just see
the mountains in the areas and see pretty. Danya told
his family members that while living in Boise, he was
frequently pulled over while driving in his new Lexus. After
digging through a lot of court records, we were able
to find that Dania was arrested in August for possession
(25:16):
of marijuana and paraphernalia in Boise. Over the following months,
Donia would be assigned a public defender and even spend
nine days in jail for a failure to appear. The
records show a lot of back and forth, a lot
of resetting of dates, missed dates, etcetera. It's all kind
of boring, but the long and short of it is
the case was eventually dismissed. When he lived, he didn't
(25:38):
tail no one. He just lives. This is deja again.
She says that when Donna moved west, he didn't tell
anybody he was going. One day, he just packed up
and drove off. Melissa once told us that Donia went
to Colorado because weed was legal there. What drew him
north to Idaho is sort of a mystery. He tried
(26:00):
to convince not only his grandmother to visit, but seemingly
he even tried to convince Desa to move there to
be with him. He had reached out for me, I
think on Facebook. Then you just tell me how he's
doing through it out of town, working for some construction
place where he was painting and basically refurbishing places. And
(26:23):
I was like, okay, that's real good. And he was
trying to get me to come down there, and I
was just like, oh, I don't know about that one.
My daughter. Yeah, he wanted me to come down there
with him, and then was just like no, not right now.
He's like, well, he's gonna come to busy. When he
got close to my birthday, he ordered to come down
for my birthday. So he came down. I was shocked.
(26:46):
I'm like, you actually here. So we hung out my birthday.
He got a hotel and just shoot. That's when I
told him, like, I don't got my place anymore. So
he was just like, okay, well, you know, you just
go to his brain. How bout to my mom's house.
So he went to his mom and every day you
complete me ll take me to work or take me
(27:08):
wherever I needed to go. Deja's birthday is August seven,
so around this time, Danie was back in St. Louis
with his new Lexus and he moved in with his
mother and stepfather, where he slept on a couch in
the basement. He started talking to his uncle Daniel about
getting into real estate, and by everything we saw in
his phone data, he was very focused on this pursuit,
(27:29):
though he did do other work for money, including being
signed up for attempt service and Deja says she is
hanging out with Dna from that point on regularly, with
him picking her up and driving her to work daily.
Going through his phone, we found a few more interesting
pieces of information surrounding Danya's last day alive. For one,
Dania had been messaging with his younger brother Javan over
(27:51):
the course of the preceding week about his car needing
a new battery, and also about wanting a job application
for the call center where Javon worked. On the morning
of the sixteen, Javon asks Done if he has gotten
the new car battery yet, and don Yae answers that
he hasn't. At two twenty nine in the afternoon, don
Ye asked Javan how much a battery will cost. Then,
(28:13):
at nine thirty four pm, Danye text Javan, I've been
asking for your help, but forget it. Javon responds to
this at ten o nine pm, saying, what do you mean?
You only asked me about the app and the battery.
This back and forth seems to add another layer to
the text Dnye sent to Militia at ninety five pm
that says sorry sis. The text the police and the
(28:36):
pathologist interpreted as a final goodbye, dan Ye appears piste
off at Javan and seems to be admonishing his younger
brother for having ignored him, And that makes us wonder
if Danye's text to Militia, which he would write exactly
twenty one seconds later, really was an apology for his
having ignored her when she was over at the house
(28:57):
that day. As Militia believes, it seems to make perfect sense.
Dania is trying to get his brother's attention and his
brother isn't responding fast enough. Maybe a lightbulb clicks on
and Donia realizes a crap here. I am mad at
my brother for ignoring me, but I ignored my sister
and her son when they came over. I should tell
her I'm sorry. Danye never sent anything else after Javon's
(29:21):
final texts at ten ten pm, possibly because he was
outside of WiFi range and never saw them. There was
something else in the phone that we needed to ask
Javan about. The Google location data from Dania's phone is
hard to decipher as it is just blue lines on
a map, and as his phone had no cell service,
his movement was only tracked when the phone was logged
(29:43):
into WiFi, which for the time period in question was
only when Danya was at or near his house. We
do see for the sixteenth movement around the house, and
movement that seems to indicate that Danya headed south, perhaps
only a few houses down, perhaps further if the signal
cut out. We wondered if perhaps Danyae knew somebody in
the neighborhood whose house he could walk to, So we
(30:05):
called Javan and asked him about it. No, I do know.
We had a playing to rio the stay we'll see.
I think his family he stayed in the house. I
don't think he stay as he lived in the house
not I think they was right on to the to
live going towards that day and our Francia went to school,
he had stayed down there. Rich Trell is somebody that
(30:29):
Donya had gone to school with and had remained friends
with over the years. Melissa refers to him as Danna's
smoking buddy. We can see in Danyae's text record that
Treill reached out to Donye on the sixteenth at two
forty three pm to say new pressure on deck tennan
gee and unplugging. This was followed by a series of emojis,
(30:49):
one of a tree, a gas tank, a rocket, and
a face with smoke coming out of the mouth. So
Trell is saying he has new weed available for sale.
This seemed like an incredible lead. A friend within walking
distance who was staying in the direction that Danye's movement
data suggested he traveled, and who would hit Danyae up
that afternoon to let him know he had good new weed.
(31:11):
So we called Treill right across the trains as the
house ripe for him. So the last house he lived
in was about seven houses away from the house you
were in. Ye stay right at the corner house. According
to Treill, he had stayed at various houses in the
neighborhood as he had various family members there, but at
(31:33):
the time of Danye's death, he was staying in a
house to the south of Melissa's and to the east,
just over the railroad tracks behind her yard. This would
align with the movement data we see on Danyae's phone.
We asked Trell when he saw Donna last. So his
last his last day was the sit was the sixteen,
So you're thinking probably about something like that is when
(31:56):
you saw him. It was about a couple days before
before everything he had, he was in our spirits and
so at first. Trell says he saw Danyae a couple
of days before him. We told Treille we saw the
text he sent Danyae about having new weed for sale,
(32:17):
and since we didn't see Danya respond to that message,
we asked if Danyae just popped by, or if he
ever just stopped over and announced, I ain't popped up
at my house. He wouldn't he went to Pomlo type.
You know, I always informed me that he was because
I did he call you in that day at night
(32:42):
he was working on the car right outside that you
know about what time? Yeah, and it had all up
in the car. I said, boy, you black black and
it's not paying at surrounds. According to Trell, he had
hung out with Donya a couple of days before his death.
(33:04):
He saw Danya on the sixteenth out on the street
working on his car, roughly in mid afternoon, roughly around
the same time he texted him about having the weed.
Did danye ever respond to your October sixteen? You know,
I got all types of gas on deck text? He
didn't read, no, miss said until before he opened he
opened up that new presson on date on the six
(33:25):
think he never opened had missed. It was odd that
Trell told us the last time he saw Donya was
a couple of days before he died, and then went
on to say he saw him that afternoon on the street.
But perhaps he means that was the last time he
hung out with Danye and not just saw him in passing.
It was so frustrating that this promising lead seemed to
be a dead end. But back in Danyae's phone, we
(33:48):
find that there is around September thirt some sort of
mysterious event that has Danye quite upset and possibly seeking revenge.
This is evidenced by text to three different numbers. The
first is a singular text he sent to a number
stating plainly, I found out where dude stay at. The
next is a text he sends to a friend of
(34:09):
his who lives about three and a half hours drive
west in Springfield, Missouri, my Shianna. He tells her, been good,
a lot of bs, though everybody getting jammed up, m
f getting popped in a bit. I'll probably need to
duck off for a week there. And finally, there is
a series of texts he sends to Deja, the first
of which reads, Marcel three dark skin, I found out
(34:31):
where he stayed. Delete this after you got it. Note
Danye gave Marcell's full name, but we were withholding it
because the accusation against him is pretty heavy and has
not been proven in a court of law. Deja replied,
I got you. Danya then sent Deja pictures which we
cannot see but presumably contain Marcel's image. She asks who
(34:52):
on the first picture, so perhaps the pictures contain several
different people. The next day, Dane asks Asia, can you
have your people's line it up? We never see a
definitive end of this conversation. On September sixteenth, we see
that Danya and Deja had a video chat, and we
also see that before the first text in the series
(35:13):
was sent, at ten twenty am, Danye called Deja, So
the whole thing where he names Marcel and sends photos
of him and asked for people can line something up,
and she says, I got you had some greater context
that now only Deja knows, but it's pretty obvious. Danya
is angry about a recent event. He wants Stage's help
(35:33):
addressing it, and he thinks he may need to go
hide out in Springfield. We asked Melissa if she knew
who Marcel was him that's the one that shot at
Javon in Um. Danye's best friend, Damon was seemingly hanging
out with Danya's younger brother Javon on September twelve, when
(35:57):
Damon was shot four times agedly by Marcel. The alleged
amotive for this shooting was that javan and Damon had
recently hung out with Marcelle's girlfriend and she had posted
something of this hangout on Snapchat. He seems very mad
about he was Danyae and I. We went to the hospital.
They only let him go in and see him. He
(36:19):
came back out he was so I told him, I said, listen,
you have to let the police handle this. You know,
the police is not going to do anything. He said,
they could have killed my brother. And I told Givanne
to go and talk to the police about it, and
me and Danyelle got into it because Danyelle said that
(36:40):
if Givonne goes to the police, then they can come
back and kill Givann and I said, well, I just
need you to stay out of it. Melissa also thought
Danye was probably asking Deja in those texts for help
getting a gun. So you're you're thinking that him talking
to Deja about this this can your people line it up?
(37:02):
He's trying to get a gun through her to Danye
hope to get a gun so he could exact revenge
against Marcel. Is that why he thought he might need
to lay up in Springfield? Or was it something else,
perhaps trying to arrange for other people to do the
dirty work. I mean, this is speculation, but do you
(37:24):
think Danye would do something so far as like try
to arrange to get Marcel hurt? Danye would do it himself.
He would do it himself. Um, when it comes to
his family. That's what this is what I'm saying. He
did not play about us that and when I say
he was like my protector, he was my protector, our protectives.
(37:48):
He he did not play when if someone came after us.
Danyae's protective nature is a large part of the reason
Melissa does not leave. He would have ended his own life.
But as far as these texts are concerned, again, only
Deja knows for sure what Danya was asking for. In
(38:11):
episode six, Deja told us Danyae and Melissa had been
fighting before he died. This whole series of events, Damon
and Javon being shot at, and Donna wanting to seek retribution.
It's what that fight was about. By September nineteenth, a
week after the shooting, Melissa says police had Marcel and custody.
(38:31):
She had a long text conversation about it with Dania,
which boiled down to the fact that Dania didn't want
anyone to snitch because he believed that would be traced
back to Javon and then Javon would be targeted. He
told Melissa the Marcel problem was going to be handled
at the street level. Here she is reading part of
this text chain. The stress was going to take care
(38:55):
of that. He knows a lot of people. I said,
the streets was gonna take care of him when after
somebody else is killed. So he says, that's what I'm saying,
And the first people they will look at is Givonne.
So what he was saying was he didn't want Givonne
(39:16):
to be implicated on anything till he said, tell Givonne
to get a gun, is all I'm saying. After that,
me and him, we had our words and got into it.
That's when we got into it and he left. That
we can tell based on a record search, this Marcelle
person never was charged for shooting at Damon and Gavan.
(39:37):
Stop for a moment and think about this timeline of
events from Melissa's point of view. In August of Melissa
aids a stranger KWin after he is shot on West
Flores Saint Avenue. The next month, in September, her son
Givann is shot at while hanging out with her other
son's best friend, Damon. Then in October, Manya has found
(40:00):
hanged in Melissa's backyard. This woman knew four young black
men who were the victims of fatal or near fatal
violence over the course of three months, two of whom
were her own sons, and none of whose cases seemingly
received a satisfactory investigation. Neither Damon nor Javon wanted to
(40:23):
talk to us much about Marcel or the shooting. We
couldn't help, but wonder if Marcel was at least part
of the reason Dania seemed so anxious and maybe paranoid
in his last week or so of life. Danye's phone
was really a treasure trove of information, and there's no
way to possibly cover everything that we found. A quick note,
(40:45):
we found absolutely zero hint that Dania was interested in
men sexually in any of his data. In fact, quite
the opposite. He seemed very interested in women. So anyone
with lingering thoughts that perhaps a hidden homosexuality was secretly
eating at him, just no, there's no real smoke there.
In fact, searching his phone data, we found nothing that
(41:08):
hinted at depression or suicidal ideation in his texts, nothing
in his email, and nothing in his Google searches. Yes,
he had some struggles real estate deals that didn't work out,
in a car that needed attention, in a late payment
that was keeping it from operating. But remember back in
episode five we talked about how Donier was reconnecting with
(41:30):
his ex girlfriend Loretha. Unlocking his phone is how we
know that they texted back and forth. On the fifteenth
of October, after seven pm, they had a long conversation
in which Dane told Loretha he was getting his business
up and running, and she said that was exciting. She
said both of their birthdays were coming up in the
(41:50):
next month, so he asked her what she wanted, and
she answered that she wanted perfume and a promise ring.
She said she wanted to hear all about his business
and so jested that they go to a restaurant that weekend,
to which Danya said that sounds good, and she said okay.
The next morning, on what would ultimately be the last
(42:11):
full day of Danie's life, at about ten am, he
texted Loretha, good morning, beautiful. We don't know if he
called her that day or if she called him, so
the phone didn't ultimately reveal if Loresa is who Danya
went to see the night he died, but clearly he
had things to look forward to. There was only one
thing and the whole phone that pointed to Danya having
(42:34):
suicidal intent, and when we found it, it hit us hard,
very hard. We went into his YouTube searches and there's
like twenty searches. I'm going down and I'm finding everything
you expect. Music, it was a car, stuff, real estate,
and then there's a search for a very specific phrase,
(42:57):
which is how to tie the hangman's and was a blanket.
Looking into someone's phone data is an eerie modern proxy
for looking into their minds. Seeing photos DNA took from
his cross country journey, hearing the music he liked knowing
(43:18):
which games he liked to play. It all helped us
feel strangely close to him. There was a video in
his Google drive in which he's sitting with some friends
and as music plays in the background, he's smoking a
hookah and blowing smoke rings quite well. When a young
woman goes to blow smoke rings herself, Danya imitates her,
(43:39):
making good natured fun of her, mocking her face. Everybody
in the room is cracking up, laughing. There he was.
Everyone who knew Danyae well told us he was so
funny and silly, and now we can see that it
was true he was. We'd play it here if it
weren't for the fact that the comedy is so purely physical.
(44:00):
There isn't much to hear other than the room laughing hysterically.
In response a phone full of texts and posts and
search history that all seemed normal and healthy, but for
this one YouTube search how to tie a hangman's noose
with a blanket, searched for on October six, the last
(44:20):
day of his life. Upon finding it, we thought, this
is it. The clue we've been looking for, the piece
of evidence that tips the scale of certainty in one
clear direction. Or does it That's next time and After
the Uprising? After the Uprising is directed, produced, investigated, written
(44:44):
and reported by myself, Raino the Shell Ski and John Duffy.
John Duffy was also the editor. Dave Cassidy was producer,
sound engineering, design and mixed by Josh Condon. Executive producers
were Matt McDonough and Tina x Ros for Now This,
Brett Kushner for Group nine Media, and Jess bore of
A is executive in charge of production. Jonathan Hartwig and
Bradley Rayford were consulting producers. Eliza Craig was assistant producer
(45:06):
and did additional reporting. Mallory Keenoy was a writer's assistant.
Kristin McVicker and Taya Wilson were production assistants, and Haley
Klesmer was a post production assistant. Fact checking by Alison Humes.
Theme song and other music by Zachary Walter, legal by
Keith Sklar and Peter Yazy. Special thanks to Ann Frado,
Danny Gonzalez, Barbara Copple, Alex Lester, Bethan Macaluzo, Emily Maronoff,
(45:27):
Ruth Vaka, and the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After The Uprising is a production of Double asterisk I
Heart Media and now this in association with True Stories.
You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. If you
have useful information about the death of Danye Jones or
anything we've covered, please leave a message on our tip
line at three four seven six seven four seven four
zero one.
Hosts And Creators
Ray Nowosielski
Maria Chappelle-Nadal
John Duffy
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