Jordan Davis

Case background and investigation

On the evening of November 23, 2012, 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis was fatally shot at a Gate Petroleum gas station on Southside Boulevard in Jacksonville, Florida. Davis, an African-American high school student, was sitting in a red Dodge Durango SUV with three friends who had stopped for gum and cigarettes. The vehicle next to them was a car driven by Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old software developer who had pulled in after attending his son's wedding earlier that day.

Dunn objected to the loud hip-hop music coming from the teenagers' SUV and asked them to turn it down. One of the teens initially lowered the volume, but Davis told him to turn it back up. A verbal confrontation escalated between Dunn and Davis. Dunn retrieved a handgun from his glove compartment and fired ten rounds at the SUV; three struck Davis, hitting his legs, lungs, and aorta and killing him. The other three teenagers were unharmed as the SUV pulled away. Dunn drove off, returned to his hotel, and was arrested the next day.

Dunn claimed he acted in self-defense, testifying that he believed he saw a shotgun and feared for his life. Prosecutors argued the threat was imagined: no firearm was ever recovered from the SUV or the scene, and evidence indicated the teens posed no armed threat. Although Dunn did not formally invoke Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' law in a pretrial immunity hearing, the case became a national flashpoint in the debate over the statute, self-defense claims, and the killing of unarmed Black teenagers, drawing frequent comparison to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin.

At Dunn's first trial in February 2014, the jury convicted him on three counts of attempted second-degree murder and one count of firing into an occupied vehicle, but deadlocked on the first-degree murder charge for Davis's death, and the judge declared a mistrial on that single count. Prosecutors retried Dunn on the murder charge later that year. On October 1, 2014, after roughly five and a half hours of deliberation, the retrial jury of eight men and four women found Michael Dunn guilty of the first-degree murder of Jordan Davis.

On October 17, 2014, Dunn was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder, plus an additional 90 years for the three attempted-murder counts and 15 years for firing into the vehicle. His convictions were upheld on appeal: Florida's First District Court of Appeal affirmed in November 2016, and the Florida Supreme Court declined to disturb the case. Dunn remains incarcerated in the Florida prison system serving his life sentence. Jordan Davis's mother, Lucia (Lucy) McBath, became a prominent gun-safety advocate and was later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.