By Nathan Young
Assistant Criminal District Attorney,
Kerye Ashmore
First Assistant Criminal District Attorney, &
Karla Baugh
Assistant Criminal District Attorney, Grayson County
Howe is a small town in southern Grayson County with a population of a little over 3,300. It doesn’t see a lot of violent crime, let alone murders—the local paper is more accustomed to covering Founders Day and events about the local school district.
But that changed on August 24, 2017, when law enforcement responded to a shooting on the Highway 69/75 corridor within the Howe city limits. Tahbari Collins sustained two gunshot wounds to his chest and died on the scene. The Howe Police Department contacted local Texas Ranger Brad Oliver to request his assistance, and he and fellow Ranger Reuben Mankin, who became lead investigator, arrived to assist Howe Police Sgt. Keith Milks.
Mr. Collins was not from Howe or Grayson County; he was simply one of hundreds of travelers passing through that day on the highway. He had been sitting in the front passenger seat of his own car when he was shot. Two others were in the car at the time: Jesika Spencer, who was in the back seat, and De Marcus Griffin, who was driving. The three friends had been traveling from Houston to Atoka, Oklahoma, and back again as part of a fundraiser. They told police that as they travelled south on U.S. Highway 69/75, a major artery out of Dallas—75 goes north to Topeka, Kansas, and 69 eventually intersects Interstates 44 and 49 to Kansas City, Missouri—a black car pulled up beside them and opened fire. Neither witness could identify the shooter, make or model of the car, or license plate, nor could they provide a reason why someone would shoot at them.
As investigators searched the victim’s vehicle, they discovered five bullets had struck it, with three entering the passenger compartment. Two had hit Mr. Collins, and one was lodged in the back of the seat where he had been sitting. The other two bullets were never found. The next day investigators attended the autopsy where the two bullets from the victim’s body were recovered.
Faced with a case with no suspects, no history explaining why the offense occurred, and no immediate leads, investigators began a search for the armed driver—a needle in the vast haystack that is Texas. It would take 18 months of determined investigation; dozens of search warrants for cell tower information, tollway records, and Facebook; analysis by the U.S. Marshals and DPS of these records; facial recognition efforts; acquisition of video and media; photo enhancement; in-state and out-of-state cooperative efforts by law enforcement; and a bit of luck before the full story would be revealed.
Working the case
The first lead came the day after the murder when Kelvin Collins, the father of the victim, told Ranger Mankin that Tahbari and his friends had taken marijuana from some people at a gas station in Tushka, Oklahoma, without paying for it. The elder Mr. Collins believed that this was the motive for the murder.
Ranger Mankin began methodically checking the gas stations in Atoka and Tushka for footage of the victim’s car, a silver Hyundai Velostar. Mr. Collins’s Velostar was seen at several gas stations, but no drug exchange appeared to have occurred.
Finally, at the Tushka Truck Stop, surveillance footage of the store and parking lot showed a black Toyota Camry turn into the station. The front passenger door opened, and the passenger appeared to vomit onto the pavement. The driver exited and appeared to be recording the passenger as he continued to vomit. Both the sick passenger and the driver were clearly visible and could be readily identified in the store video by their appearance and clothing.
Shortly after the driver and passenger entered the store, the driver exited. About this time, Mr. Collins and his friends pulled into the truck stop near the gas pumps and the black Camry. It then appeared that the driver of the black Camry leaned in to speak with the occupants of Collins’s car. The Camry driver went back to his car, opened the back door, grabbed something, and returned to Collins’s car, where he leaned in—all actions consistent with a parking lot drug deal. Collins’s vehicle pulled up to the front of the truck stop and parked momentarily. It then backed up and sped onto the highway.
The Camry driver started toward Collins’s vehicle, then stopped as it drove away. The driver entered the truck stop and exited a few minutes later with his passenger, the one who had been sick. They both got into the black Camry, and they too turned and sped southbound on Highway 69/75.
In almost 39 years of prosecution and a hundred or so murder cases, Kerye Ashmore (one of the co-authors of this article) had never had a case where the perpetrator was on film—so we knew exactly what he looked like—but we had no idea where he came from, where he went, whom he was with, or any type of identifiers. There was no special connection with the victims, either. The perpetrator wasn’t a family member, girlfriend, someone from the victim’s past, or a person with any type of relationship. The task of finding the perpetrator seemed to be very, very daunting. We were discouraged.
However, investigators kept at it. Ranger Mankin pulled still photographs of the driver and passenger from the truck stop video and sent them to Texas and Oklahoma law enforcement. While waiting to see if anyone recognized the driver, he went to the scene of the shooting in Howe and canvassed nearby businesses to see if any security cameras caught the vehicles involved in the crime. That’s when he found a glimmer of the elusive “needle” in the haystack. Surveillance video from a used car dealership near the shooting showed a car closely resembling the black Camry from the Oklahoma truck stop drive by at the time of the shooting. The Camry was speeding southbound on Highway 69/75, just south of the crime scene.
On August 30, 2017, Ranger Mankin and Sergeant Milks traveled to Leon County, a convenient place for us (from Sherman) to meet the two witnesses from Tahbari Collins’s car (both from Houston), and the elder Mr. Collins (from Huntsville). The DA’s Office there kindly provided facilities for interviews of Kelvin Collins and Mr. Griffin and Ms. Spencer. Griffin and Spencer confirmed that Tahbari Collins had indeed taken a small amount of weed from a black man at the truck stop in Tushka and had left without paying for it. Griffin maintained that he did not know the black Camry had followed them into Texas until he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the car speeding and weaving through traffic before the shooting began. Spencer told officers that the last time she remembered seeing the driver of the black Camry, he was standing in the truck stop parking lot looking stunned as they drove off. Video at the Tushka Truck Stop showed that the shooter left about 4½ minutes after the victim’s car did. So, in the next 60 miles from Tushka, Oklahoma to Howe, Texas, the Camry had closed the gap. Video from the Calera, Oklahoma, Police Department, which had a camera filming U.S. Highway 69/75, also showed that in a distance of 30 miles, the defendant was only 2 minutes and 15 seconds behind the victim’s car.
Both maintained they did not know the person beforehand and that this was a purely chance meeting: They simply approached this person and wanted a little weed to smoke. The amount involved: one to two grams of marijuana. The agreed price: $10.
Naming the suspects
With solid suspects and a motive for the shooting, investigators now had to find names to go with the faces in the surveillance video. Still images were submitted the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to complete an Image Verification System Workup, but no matches were found. Investigators requested by warrant the cell tower records for all the major carriers near the Oklahoma truck stop and the Texas crime scene, and DPS and the U.S. Marshal’s Service reviewed those records, but no immediate leads came from any of them. Multiple search warrants were also served on the North Texas Tollway Authority looking for a black Camry with certain features believed to be involved in the shooting; it might have been travelling south on the North Dallas Tollway or west on Highway 121 (another tollway)—but no leads developed. The acquisition, review, and analysis of these records took months.
Detective Aaron Benzick with the Plano Police Department had been assisting Ranger Mankin with the execution of several warrants, including for data from a tower serviced by T-Mobile. And that was when officers caught a break. Knowing from the video footage that the driver of the black Camry had appeared to use a cell phone at the Tushka Truck Stop and knowing at what time the phone was used, Detective Benzick found an outgoing call to a number in Missouri associated with Montrae Austin—he had received a call on his cell phone. A Facebook search led to Montrae Austin’s account, and one of the photographs on that Facebook account showed Austin sitting on the hood of a black Toyota Camry.
From there, the case fell into place. Further photographs of the Toyota Camry from Austin’s Facebook page matched the make, model, year, and trim details of the suspect vehicle in the truck stop surveillance videos and were consistent with the car dealership surveillance video from Howe. The license plate on the vehicle came back to Montrae Austin.
Austin’s Facebook account also contained the images of two people closely resembling the suspects captured on the surveillance footage from the Tushka truck stop. These men were identified as Sekou Finley and Kelvon Gray. Deep dives into the public information on these men’s Facebook accounts, together with phone records and cell tower information on all three, confirmed that the men had traveled from Kansas City, Missouri, to Dallas down the 75/69 corridor on the day of the murder. Comparison of Facebook photos of Kelvon Gray and photos from the truck stop also clearly showed he was the same person as the man driving the black Camry in the truck stop footage.
Arresting the suspects
On June 9, 2019, Ranger Mankin and Sergeant Milks traveled to Kansas City seeking Finley, Austin, and Gray. With tireless cooperation and help from the Kansas City, Missouri, police, Finley was located, and he agreed to be interviewed. He told investigators that he, Montrae Austin, and Kelvon Gray had left Kansas City on the morning of August 24 and headed to Dallas to party for the weekend. On the way, he and Austin had become highly intoxicated, so Kelvon Gray had assumed driving duties. They stopped in Tushka, and Finley (the sick passenger from the surveillance video) insisted he had slept through the shooting and was too drunk to remember anything. Eventually, though, after he talked to his mother, Finley admitted that his companions had told him about the shooting, that it was over a small amount of weed that was not paid for, and that Kelvon Gray was the shooter, Gray having admitted as much to Finley.
Montrae Austin was also located and interviewed. He too claimed that he had been drunk and asleep at the truck stop and unaware of anything that happened there. He ultimately admitted that he had been asleep but awakened to the sound of gunfire as Kelvon Gray fired into a vehicle next to their car. Austin would also admit that once in Dallas, Gray related what had happened at the truck stop and that the shooting was in retaliation for the victims stealing marijuana.
A few days later, while Ranger Mankin and Sgt. Milks waited in Kansas City, prosecutor Kerye Ashmore presented the case to a Grayson County grand jury with the newest information available. The grand jury returned an indictment for murder for Kelvon Gray, and a capias warrant immediately issued and was transmitted to Kansas City. Based on that warrant and a search warrant obtained in Kansas City for Gray’s residence, Gray was arrested at his home and a search performed. A 9-mm handgun was seized; it was transferred to the DPS Crime Lab in Garland where ballistics testing and analysis confirmed that Gray’s gun had fired the lethal rounds at Mr. Collins and the bullet found in the seat of the victim’s vehicle.
Feeling that it was essential to establish face-to-face contact and interviews with the police officers and other witnesses in Kansas City, Grayson County Criminal District Attorney Brett Smith agreed that we should travel there in preparation for trial. In September 2021, DA Investigator Mike Ditto and prosecutor Kerye Ashmore went to Kansas City to interview the numerous KCPD officers involved in the searches and other aspects of the case; we also attended the out-of-state-witness subpoena hearing for Finley and Austin. We interviewed these men, too, and insured their stories remained accurate and consistent. The help of the DA’s Office in Kansas City was invaluable in this effort.
The trial
As trial neared, we prosecutors (Kerye Ashmore and Nathan Young) decided that Kerye would handle the eyewitnesses and the witnesses from Kansas City, and Nathan would handle the morass of search warrants, phone records, and Facebook records together with the DPS analyst explaining all it. We had tried four murder cases since COVID-19 restrictions were temporarily lifted in November 2020, reinstated, and lifted again in 2021, and Nathan had become masterful at understanding and presenting these types of records.
On October 18, the murder trial against Kelvon Gray began. Bit by bit the jury heard how the perpetrator of this senseless murder—over $10 worth of stolen marijuana—was identified and arrested. After a weeklong trial, the day of justice arrived. Gray, who had no previous criminal record, was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Conclusion
Ultimately a combination of investigative persistence, cooperation among law enforcement agencies and prosecutor offices, old-fashioned legwork, witness interviews, cell tower dumps, deep dives on social media, and expert testimony found the needle in the haystack in this case. We were proud to present this case to a jury after a long, difficult, and excellent investigation by law enforcement, and we were determined to do our best at trial to reflect that investigation and seek justice for Tahbari Collins. The jury’s verdict did just that.