XXXTentacion

Case background and investigation

Jahseh Onfroy, who performed as XXXTentacion, was a 20-year-old rapper from South Florida whose music had reached the Billboard charts. On the afternoon of June 18, 2018, he visited RIVA Motorsports, a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale. According to CBS Miami, he was carrying a Louis Vuitton bag holding 50,000 dollars in cash that he had withdrawn from a bank.

As he drove out of the dealership in his BMW, a Dodge Journey SUV cut in front of his car and blocked it, WPLG Local 10 reported. Two masked men got out, confronted him at the driver's window, took the bag and shot him several times before the SUV drove away. Wikipedia's account, based on Broward Sheriff's Office statements, puts the shooting shortly before 4 p.m. and says he was pronounced dead at a hospital less than an hour later.

The Broward Sheriff's Office made four arrests over the following weeks. NBC News reported that Dedrick Williams, 22, was arrested within days of the shooting and that Michael Boatwright, 22, already in jail on an unrelated drug charge, was served with a murder warrant on July 11, 2018. Robert Allen and Trayvon Newsome were arrested later that summer, according to Wikipedia. A grand jury indicted the four men in July 2018.

The case took nearly five years to reach trial, delayed in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and pretrial disputes, CBS Miami reported. In 2022 Allen pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and agreed to testify for the prosecution. Jury selection for the other three began in Fort Lauderdale in January 2023. Prosecutors relied on surveillance video from the dealership, cellphone data, a fingerprint on the victim's car door attributed to Boatwright, and photographs of the defendants with large amounts of cash, according to CBS Miami. Investigators said Boatwright and Newsome were the masked men, that Williams drove the SUV and that Allen was a passenger, Local 10 reported.

After more than a week of deliberations, the jury found Boatwright, Williams and Newsome guilty of first-degree murder and armed robbery on March 20, 2023. On April 6, 2023, all three were sentenced to life in prison; the death penalty had not been sought. Relatives and the rapper's manager addressed the court at sentencing.

According to Wikipedia, Allen was sentenced in May 2023 to seven years in prison followed by 20 years of probation and, with credit for time served, was released in October 2023. Local 10 reported at sentencing that the three convicted men were expected to appeal; no ruling overturning the convictions was found in the sources reviewed.