BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
FOR GLASGOW NEWS 1
The prosecution rested its case against Inell Crayton at the conclusion of the second day of his trial in Barren Circuit Court on Wednesday.
Crayton is charged with murder, first-degree burglary and tampering with physical evidence in relation to the Dec. 28, 2018, shooting death of Ke’Shawn Sarver, 22, of Cave City.
On Tuesday, the morning was taken for jury selection, which was followed after a lunch break by opening statements from the prosecution and defense plus testimony from Sarver’s mother; from Chris Poynter, a former Cave City Police Department officer who lived in the same apartment complex as Sarver and responded to the scene after neighbors told him shots had been fired; and from Josh Amos, the lead Kentucky State Police detective on the case.
Five new prosecution witnesses – three of whom were involved in varying degrees in the events of that day – testified on Wednesday, and Amos also returned to the stand, primarily to testify as to a video that was shown of his interview with Crayton on Jan. 1, 2019. The defense called one person to the stand briefly before the court adjourned for the day.
In the videorecorded interview with Amos, Crayton said that Kayla Anderson, his girlfriend arranged with someone she knew in Cave City for them to purchase marijuana and the two of him and his friend Devonja Sweat of Nashville, whom they’d gone and picked up earlier on Dec. 28, 2018, pooled their money, some of which came from the sale of a PlayStation 4 to come up with $1,600.
Anderson drove them to Cave City, where Ke’Shawn Sarver met them in the parking lot of his apartment complex, got in the car and directed them to a house not far from there where the source of the product lived. Sarver told Anderson to pull into the end of the driveway and turn off the car lights, and he was given the money from the trio and went up the driveway to a house on a hill. Several minutes after he disappeared with someone else they saw in the shadows near the house, Crayton got out of the car to go up there and handed Sweat the Taurus 9 mm that was registered to him and told Sweat to stay in the car with Anderson. In the video, Crayton tells Amos that he intended for Sweat to use it if necessary for protection, particularly Anderson’s, and Crayton kept with him a Kahr 9 mm he had borrowed from someone else. But then Sweat got out and followed him up the hill.
Crayton noticed down the back of the hill looked like the apartment complex from which they’d just picked up Sarver, and he and Sweat went on foot across the field to get there, and they began asking around to find which apartment was Sarver’s, but no one answered from within the dark apartment when they knocked. Then a dog appeared at the window, and the light of a cell phone was visible, and Crayton kicked in the door.
He said in the video what came next happened very quickly. He said it appeared that Sarver was swinging something toward him as he approached. He had thought initially he’d only fired two shots and didn’t know whether Sarver was still alive when he left the apartment.
He said Sweat had gone in with him but he didn’t do anything and never fired a gun.
In the interview with Amos, Crayton took sole responsibility for shooting Sarver, but he said it had not been his intent to do so when he tracked down where he lived. He had intended to give him a “whooping” for taking their money, however, and he wanted it back, because it was all they had.
Crayton said he didn’t know at what point the dog, which was fatally wounded, was shot and thought he must have been behind Sarver when he was hit.
The projectiles recovered at the scene were in the refrigerator door, in the bathroom shower and in the floor underneath Sarver’s body, Amos had testified Tuesday. At least some of the shell casings were in the bathroom.
Amos told him the evidence indicated Sarver was shot twice at close range after he was already down from the initial injury. Crayton seemed to not remember that it occurred that way but conceded that perhaps it did.
He said that on the way back to Allen County, after Anderson had picked him up and then Sweat, he handed the Kahr to Sweat, who disassembled it and threw it out a car window. Crayton also said in the video that he had later thrown away the shoes he’d worn because he realized he may have left a shoeprint on the door, and he told Amos where the dumpster was, but Amos testified later that they had not been able to recover the shoes.
Kayla Anderson, who had been in “a serious relationship” with Crayton for four or five years and lived with him in Allen County at the time of the alleged crimes, also testified that she had arranged with Sarver to obtain some marijuana on Dec. 28, 2018. She later drove herself, Crayton and Sweat to Cave City to meet up with Sarver. He met them in the parking area of the apartment complex and got in the vehicle, chatted for a bit with her and directed her to take them all “around the corner” to this house that was behind the apartments, pull into the end of the “very long driveway” and turn off the car lights because the person from whom they were getting the marijuana lived with parents who were unaware of his dealings. He asked them for the money to take to the source of the product and told them to stay in the car. Anderson said the house was dark, and she couldn’t see the person Sarver was meeting – only a shadow, and then she lost sight of them. Sarver never returned to the car. After an estimated 8 to 10 minutes, Crayton got out of the car to go check out the situation and went up the driveway. She said he came back long enough to tell Sweat to stay in the car with Anderson, but Sweat decided to leave the vehicle as well and followed Crayton.
“After they walked up the driveway, I don’t know what happened,” she said. “It was very dark out there.”
Anderson said she remained in the driveway for a while but then saw a woman looking out the window of the house, so she left and drove around for a while at a nearby gas station and circling back and forth. She said she tried multiple times to contact Sarver but he never responded.
Crayton later called her and asked her to pick him up, which she said she did near the entrance of the apartment complex and then Crayton was able to reach Sweat and they picked him up at a store across from the complex.
When Crayton got back in the car, though, he told her he had shot Sarver twice, but he didn’t know where and whether he was still alive. As they drove back to Allen County, Crayton handed a gun to Sweat that was smaller than the one registered in their name, and Sweat disassembled it and threw it out the window of the vehicle.
She testified that Crayton later told her he would take responsibility for the shooting and turn himself in, but, because his was the primary income for the household, he wanted to get their bills and other matters squared away first. The next day, they took Sweat back home to Nashville and then went to her parents’ home, because she wanted them to hear what happened from her before they heard it elsewhere, she said.
At some point after she was arrested, law enforcement officers took her with them to have her help locate where the gun had been tossed. Amos had already testified they found part of it, but not the slide.
In response to questioning, Anderson said she had an agreement with the commonwealth’s attorney that if she testified truthfully in this case, she would get a pretrial diversion in her own case, in which she’s charged with tampering with physical evidence.
In her cross-examination by defense attorney Lee Davis, Anderson said that while she had used marijuana for medical reasons before, the decision for them to try to purchase more than usual and sell some was because Crayton’s boss had wanted him not to do side jobs like he had been for a person who used to work for this same boss but then started his own business, so their income had decreased.
— Sweat’s testimony mostly matched that of Crayton and/or Anderson, but the details of what happened inside Sarver’s apartment varied some. He said Crayton did not have his gun drawn when he kicked in Sarver’s door, but pulled it after Sarver initially stepped back but then came back toward them with a phone in one hand and some other item in the other. Sweat said Sarver’s dog jumped on him as he tried to step between the two other men to cool things off, and he fell down. The gun he had fell to the floor and magazine fell out of it. He saw flashes of light with the gun shots and eventually, before he ran away, that Sarver was on the floor and that the dog had been hit. He thought he might have heard as many as five shots, but he said he couldn’t see much of what happened.
— Andrew Connors testified that he had been with Sarver since about 1 p.m. Dec. 28, 2018, and they had been at Sarver’s place for a while and then they went to the apartment of Katelyn Overfelt. It was while they were there that Sarver was contacted by Anderson and the arrangements for the purchase were made, but Connors and Sarver created a plan in which they would get the $1,600 and then head back across a field to the apartment complex, which is essentially what he said happened. They each returned to Overfelt’s place at their individual paces and Sarver said he was going home to change clothes. Overfelt came in later and told Connors that Crayton had been killed, and he left after that.
Connors told Davis, “We just thought it was a plan that would have no repercussions. … I can’t say honestly why. It was a mistake, I guess.”
Gardner, on redirect, asked whether they’d had any intention of using violence, to which Connors responded in the negative, and he also testified that neither he nor Sarver were armed.
Expert witnesses
— Randall Falls Jr., who is the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Sarver described in biological detail the paths within the body that the three projectiles that struck him took. He documented six total injuries from three wounds. One gunshot entered Sarver’s left cheek and became lodged in the skull after injuring the brain; one entered the right side of his neck and damaged, among other things, Sarver’s jugular vein and spinal cord before exiting his body in the upper central area of his back; and the third perforated – passed completely through – Sarver’s right forearm.
A blood test also determined that Sarver had methamphetamine in his system.
Falls concluded from his examination that the cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds to the head and torso, and either of the first two described would have been fatal “because they disrupted vital structures.”
— Lawrence Pilcher, a fire and tool mark specialist at a KSP forensics lab, testified that he was relatively easily to determine that none of the spent ammunition removed from Sarver’s apartment and Sarver himself came from the Taurus 9 mm that was retrieved. He described in detail the challenges encountered with trying to match those spent casings and/or projectiles to a gun with no slide, as was the case with the Kahr 9 mm that was recovered near Barren River Lake. He was ultimately able to to just confirm that the bullets came from the same unknown gun.
The proceedings continue at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, and they are expected to go through Friday.
NOTE: This report has been edited since the initial posting to clarify Pilcher’s testimony.
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