Shooter gets life in prison in 2022 killing of Casanova Carter on St. Paul's West Side

Yahoo

29-01-2025

Casanova Carter's daughter Nova was 2 years old when he was murdered, shot by three bullets while he played a video game at his home on St. Paul's West Side.
Nova is now 5 years old and struggles with the loss of her father, who was 'taken from her in such a senseless matter,' the child's mother, Amber Schultz, said Wednesday in a Ramsey County courtroom before gunman Delaquay Levius Williams was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
'Her dad was her best friend, and now she has a life sentence of not having him here,' Schultz said in her victim impact statement. 'So I think it's more than appropriate that he also gets a life sentence.'
Carter, 26, was in the bedroom at his home in the 700 block of Winslow Avenue when a barrage of bullets was fired through his window around 10:15 p.m. Feb. 1, 2022. He was hit in the head, face and back, and the father of three daughters died at the scene.
Investigators recovered 18 spent casings outside the home that ballistics testing showed came from four guns — three 9mm and a .45 caliber.
Carter's funeral three weeks later was the scene of more gunfire that claimed another man's life and injured three others. Agustin Martinez, 28, of Crystal, was shot to death and three other people were wounded by gunfire outside Simple Traditions by Bradshaw Funeral Home on St. Paul's West Side.
Williams and three other men — Kendall Dvontae Pruitt, Dai'Quan Lamar Husten and Montez Dalray Davis — were charged in Carter's killing, which prosecutors say happened after Carter called Pruitt a 'snitch' in a Facebook post.
'This was a senseless act of violence, driven by nothing more than a need for recognition on the streets,' Carter's sister, Morayma Hernandez, said in her victim impact statement, which was read in court by Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Elizabeth Lamin.
Last month, jurors deliberated for about five hours over two days before convicting Williams of all counts: aiding and abetting first-degree premeditated murder; aiding and abetting first- and second-degree murder for the benefit of the gang; aiding and abetting second-degree intentional murder; and possession of a firearm while ineligible.
'The defendant's actions were deliberate, premeditated and callous, and showed no regard for human life as he destroyed this family,' Lamin said in court Wednesday.
Williams, 30, of St. Paul, declined to address the court before hearing his sentence from Judge Timothy Mulrooney.
Williams was associated with the Hilltop Hustlers gang, according to prosecutors, while Carter and Pruitt both had been part of a 2016 federal indictment of Hit Squad gang members and served time in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Murder charges have not been filed in Martinez's death, which police said was gang-related. Four men were sentenced to either prison or the county jail for their roles in the gun battle.
At Williams' trial last month, prosecutors relied on testimony from Husten and Davis and introduced as evidence video surveillance footage, cellphone records and a DNA swab collected from the murder scene that matched Williams.
The prosecution played in court video surveillance that showed a Nissan Altima with no license plates drive past Carter's home two minutes before the shooting and turn down a neighboring street. Shortly thereafter, four people walked into the yard.
Lamin told jurors that Williams, Davis and Pruitt walked to the north side of the home, where Carter was playing a video game in front of his window, and Husten went to the front door. They all shot, according to Lamin.
St. Paul police Sgt. Nichole Sipes testified that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension discovered the DNA swabbed from siding below Carter's bedroom window was a major profile match to Williams.
Sipes said an FBI analysis of cellphone data placed the co-defendants' phones together in St. Paul before the murder and immediately afterward.
Prosecutors charged Williams, Davis and Pruitt with aiding and abetting second-degree intentional murder six weeks after Carter's killing. They were indicted the following July. Husten was charged with aiding and abetting second-degree intentional murder three months later.
In exchange for cooperating in Williams' case, the prosecution agreed to take first-degree murder charges off the table for Husten and Davis.
Pruitt, 28, of Minneapolis, also spoke with the prosecution prior to pleading guilty to second-degree intentional murder in September 2023. In exchange for the plea, both sides agreed that his grand jury charges would be dropped. He was sentenced to 34 years in prison.
The murder cases against Davis, 26, of Minneapolis, and Husten, 26, of St. Paul, remain ongoing.
Just over a month after Carter's killing, Williams allegedly fatally shot 31-year-old Regis Jones in an alley in St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood, according to a complaint in that case charging him with second-degree murder.
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Police believe that Williams murdered (Jones) to keep him from talking about the murder of (Carter),' a 2022 complaint against Williams' cousin Dovyion Daquay Glass says. Glass, 34, of Roseville, pleaded guilty to being an accomplice after the fact in Jones' homicide and was sentenced in June 2023 to just over 7½ years in prison.
Williams has pleaded not guilty in that case, which is ongoing.
At the time of both murders, Williams was wanted by police for absconding from his Nov. 10 supervised release from Minnesota Correctional Facility-St. Cloud relating to June 2018 convictions in two nonfatal shootings that year.