Franklin Davis was sentenced to death by the State of Texas for the murder of sixteen year old Shania Gray
According to court documents Shania Gray had pressed charges against Franklin Davis for sexual assault. Pretending to be someone else Franklin arranged a meeting with Shania. When she would arrive at the site the sixteen year old would be killed
Franklin Davis would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
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Where Is Franklin Davis Now
Franklin Davis is incarcerated at the Polunsky Unit
Franklin Davis Case
In September 2010, when Shania Gray was fourteen years old, her mother, Sherri Gray-James, arranged a babysitting job for her at the request of an acquaintance named Jennifer Dibrell. Gray began babysitting Dibrell’s three children after school. One of those three children was Davis and Dibrell’s daughter, Dezire. Gray-James would drop Gray off at Dibrell’s apartment each time she was scheduled to babysit. In March 2011, Gray-James noticed some text messages on Gray’s phone from a person named “Wish.” Gray-James had met Davis and knew that “Wish” was his nickname. In one of the text messages, Wish asked Gray why she was not coming to babysit anymore. In another message, Wish stated, “That’s foul. So I’m supposed to sit around and wait? Man. Whatever.” Gray responded, “Nope. You[‘re] getting mad for what? You got two for the price of one. What [are] you complaining for? Tryna [sic] have your cake and eat it too.” Franklin Davis answered, “Just want you but can’t fully have you yet.” When Gray-James asked Gray about the messages, Gray became very upset and began crying.
Gray-James then drove to Dibrell’s apartment with Gray and showed Dibrell the messages. Dibrell called Franklin Davis and told him that Gray-James was upset about the text messages. Gray-James felt that Dibrell reacted in a “nonchalant” manner, and she demanded to speak with Franklin Davis herself. Dibrell instructed her to call him the next day. When Gray-James sent Davis a text message the next morning, he responded that Gray was lying. He claimed that, when he sent the messages to Gray, he thought that someone was playing a prank with the phone and did not know he was corresponding with Gray. Gray-James told Franklin Davis that he was the liar and she would go to the police.
Franklin Davis preemptively called the police himself. He told the responding officer that, when Gray texted him, he did not know who it was and he “did not know Shania had a cell phone.” He said that he was just “playing around” with an unknown correspondent. However, in a later interview with Detective Brandon Snyder, Davis changed his story and admitted he knew he was corresponding with Gray. He said that his text message to Gray, stating that he wanted her, was really intended to inform her that she was “too young” and that was why he could not “see her.”
The day after Gray-James talked to Dibrell, Gray was visibly upset and crying at school. She confided in two sisters who were her close friends. She told them that she had been babysitting and this “guy” started “messing with her, touching her and stuff like that.” Gray told the older sister that the sexual encounters had started out “as a habit,” but the man had gotten “rough” with her. She told her that he threw her on the bed, threatened her with a “[s]amurai sword,” and told her “If you tell, I’m going to kill you and your family.” The sisters convinced her to come home with them after school and tell their mother what had happened. Gray then revealed to their mother that she had been sexually assaulted multiple times while she was babysitting. Their mother convinced her that she needed to tell her own mother. Gray then told Gray-James about the sexual assaults.
Gray-James contacted the school resource officer at Gray’s school, Horn High School. She also took Gray to the Mesquite Police Department and met with Detective Snyder. Subsequently, she took Gray to the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center (DCAC) for a videotaped interview and then to the Children’s Medical Center for a physical examination.
In the DCAC interview, Gray described four separate sexual assaults in which Franklin Davis penetrated her vagina when she fourteen years old—three at Dibrell’s apartment and one at Davis’s apartment. Snyder obtained an analysis of the content of Gray’s phone and discovered that she had Davis’s birthday listed in her phone’s calendar. He also viewed the text message exchange between Wish and Gray that had distressed Gray-James.
Later, Franklin Davis was arrested for sexual assault and began having scheduled court dates. Gray was planning to testify against Davis in his trial. Several months passed, during which Gray’s family prepared to move from Mesquite to Carrollton, Texas, and Gray started attending Hebron High School in Carrollton.
On September 6, 2012, Gray informed her mother that she was going to attend after-school tutoring for her physics class, and Gray-James planned to pick her up at school after the tutoring. During the tutoring session, Gray sent a text message to her mother telling her that she was almost done. Gray-James parked in front of the school at around 4:00 p.m. and waited for Gray, but Gray never came out to meet her. Gray-James called and sent text messages to Gray repeatedly. She went to a nearby Starbucks and used her laptop to try to locate Gray’s phone with no success. She returned to the school and found that the physics classroom where Gray had gone for tutoring was locked and dark. She contacted the physics teacher, who stated that Gray had left tutoring when it ended at 4:15 p.m. A group of teachers and coaches helped Gray-James search the school and the nearby football stadium, but they found no sign of Gray.
Gray-James contacted the Hebron High School resource officer, Officer Forest Cole Langston. Officer Langston became very concerned when he spoke to the Horn High School resource officer and learned that Gray was the named victim on four sexual assault indictments and Franklin Davis was the defendant charged in those cases. Officer Langston reviewed surveillance footage showing that Gray had exited Hebron High School through a back door normally used by coaches. A still photo from a surveillance camera showed a gray Dodge Stratus parked nearby. Further investigation indicated that this car matched the description of a vehicle owned by Davis’s wife, Jawanna Arrington Davis (hereafter “Arrington”).
Meanwhile, on the evening of September 6th, Davis picked Arrington up after work driving her Stratus. She noticed a strong smell of cologne in the car and wondered if Franklin Davis was trying to cover up the smell of a woman. They drove to the hospital because Davis said that he had injured his arm at the gym. However, he only waited about ten minutes and then left before seeing a doctor. They went home and took a bubble bath together. Arrington said Franklin Davis was being more affectionate than normal and they “were intimate” that night.
The missing person case was assigned to Detective Dena Williams of the Carrollton Police Department. Gray-James gave Williams access to Gray’s cell phone records and the passwords to her social media accounts. Officers discovered that the phone number that Gray had communicated with immediately before and after she sent the last text message to her mother had a 903 area code. Gray-James did not recognize this number. Williams obtained call records for both Gray’s phone and the 903 phone number.
Detective Snyder testified that he tried to determine who had purchased the phone with the 903 number but could not uncover this information. However, he determined that the 903 phone number had contacted another number on the day of Gray’s disappearance. Officers called this number and discovered that it belonged to Shakeema Morsley, a coworker and friend of Arrington’s. Morsley gave police full access to her phone and text messages. They discovered that the person using the 903 phone number had asked Morsley to tell him where her new apartment was located. He had refused to tell Morsley his name, but provided hints to his identity. Based on the various contextual clues, Morsley deduced that this person was Davis. She refused to give him her new address.
Morsley also gave Arrington’s phone number to Detective Williams. Williams called Arrington. Within a few minutes, Arrington handed the phone to Davis and he spoke with Williams. Williams told him she was investigating a missing child. Davis acted very concerned. Williams asked Davis if he knew anything about the 903 phone number. He denied any knowledge of it.
Officers conducted surveillance on Franklin Davis and Arrington’s apartment and the Dodge Stratus, which was parked in the apartment complex parking lot. While officers were watching, Franklin Davis exited the apartment and began walking toward the officers. They handcuffed him for their safety because he was known to be a bodybuilder and to carry a pistol. They walked with him back to the apartment because he said his knees were hurting and mosquitoes were biting him. They removed the handcuffs and requested that he follow them to the police department to discuss Gray. Franklin Davis agreed to come with them and, accompanied by Arrington, he drove to the police department in the Dodge Stratus.
Williams interviewed Franklin Davis at the police department. Davis said that he felt that Gray had falsely accused him of sexual assault. He told Williams that he had text messages from Gray on his phone proving that she had lied about the sexual assaults. He denied having any knowledge of the 903 phone number or Gray’s current location and denied having any recent communications with Morsley.
While Franklin Davis was being interviewed, Arrington gave consent for the police to retain her Dodge Stratus for processing. Canine handlers brought a “cadaver dog” (trained to search for the scent of a decaying body) and a dog trained to alert to Gray’s scent to the parking lot at the police station. Both dogs displayed a positive reaction to the Dodge Stratus. At some point after the interview with Williams, Davis was arrested on the basis of outstanding traffic ticket warrants.
Detectives Edward Teniente and Jeremy Chevallier also assisted with the investigation. They received cell phone tower data for Davis’s T-Mobile phone, which showed that his phone was at or near Hebron High School at 4:01 p.m. on September 6th, which was around the time that Gray had disappeared. Davis indicated to officers at the jail that he wished to speak with detectives. Teniente and Chevallier brought Davis into an interview room and read him his Miranda rights. In this interview, the detectives informed Davis about the cell tower data. Davis admitted that he had been speaking with Gray on the phone and recording their conversations to document discrepancies between what she said on the phone and what she said in the police reports. He continued to deny having had any contact with Gray on the day she disappeared. Davis was returned to the jail after this interview.
Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).
About an hour and a half later, Franklin Davis indicated that he wanted to talk to Detective Chevallier again. Chevallier and Teniente retrieved Davis from the jail for a third recorded interview. They asked him if he remembered the rights Chevallier had read to him previously. Davis said he did and then stated:
A lot of the information that y'all say y'all have, it's not correct . . . . Honestly, I felt like that with a lot of the information that you was [sic] saying to me, that I would have been able to, been able to walk but I wouldn't be able to live with myself because I done it [sic].Franklin Davis admitted to the officers that he had met Gray at the high school in the parking lot on the day of the offense. He explained that, about two and one-half months before the day he met Gray at the school, he adopted a false identity and began communicating with Gray using a “go phone” with a 903 phone number. Davis had selected a young man’s profile photo from Facebook that he thought Gray would like. He told Gray that this was a photo of him and his nickname was “D.” Davis told Gray that he (“D”) had seen her on Facebook and he was “looking for a new friend, someone to get to know.” He assured her it was “nothing sexual.” Davis told the officers that he used this “D” alias to have telephone conversations with Gray on the go phone and recorded those conversations using his T-Mobile phone.
Posing as “D,” Franklin Davis persuaded Gray to trust him. He induced her to talk about the first time she had sex and other personal matters. She eventually talked about the sexual assaults. Franklin Davis insisted to the detectives that Gray’s account to “D” of the sexual assaults was not the same as the account in the police report. He said that he felt he got what he “needed” for his trial from the recorded conversations with Gray. He told the officers that he had not talked to Gray in a while, but then he decided he wanted to talk to her “face-to-face” and renewed contact with her on September 5th.
Franklin Davis recalled that, when Gray first saw him at the school on September 6th, she said, “Oh, shit.” He said he reassured her that he was not going to hurt her and she got into the car with him voluntarily. He then drove to a park area. He asked her “why she [had] lied and said things that she did to get [him] in trouble.” Davis said Gray responded that her “mama made her do it.” He said, “I told her I had been sitting outside her house and my demons was [sic] weighing on me so bad to where I wanted to kill everybody in that house.” He said that he called this part of him “Wish,” which was “the dark side of me that I let go years ago.”
Davis told the officers that he and Gray got out of the car at the park and started walking down a trail. He said that he was “trying to tell her how much she had fucked up [his] whole life with the lies that she told.” He said they walked off the trail, and he pulled the gun out. He shot Gray, but he was not sure where he had hit her. She fell into the water. He said Gray lay in the water for a second, “trying to act like she was dead.” He shot her again. He said she cried and said, “[W]hy Wish?” He said he threw her jacket down to her to get her out of the water. He explained: “I wanted to stop but . . . I felt like if I would have stopped she would have told what had happened . . . . So I told her to lay [sic] down on the grass. And she laid [sic] down on the grass . . . . I put my foot on her neck and I pressed down.” Davis said Gray grabbed his leg for about three seconds, then let go. He said, “I asked her to forgive me.” He then rolled her body into the water and left the park. He said he drove out of the parking lot and then pulled back in because he wanted to go to help her, but he knew it was too late. He told the detectives that he was sorry for what he had done.
Detective Teniente asked Davis if he always carried a gun. He shook his head “no.” Davis said he initially obtained the gun to use it on himself. He was not sure when he decided to use it on Gray. Davis said he threw the gun out the window while driving down the highway. He said he also threw Gray’s cell phone and the go phone out the window. He said he left Gray’s backpack with her body.
At the end of the interview, Franklin Davis agreed to accompany the officers to locate Gray’s body. He rode with the officers in an unmarked vehicle. In the meantime, a bicycle officer had already found Gray’s body floating in the Trinity River and found her backpack nearby. When Chevallier and Teniente asked Davis to take them “to where it happened,” he led them to the place where the crime scene team was already in the process of recovering Gray’s body. He also led them to the locations where he had thrown the gun into a pond, where he had thrown Gray’s phone into another pond, and where he had disposed of his shoes in a sewer drain.
The autopsy revealed that Gray’s body had undergone a substantial amount of decomposition while floating in the water. She had been shot once in the shoulder and once in the back. She had further suffered forceful asphyxia to her neck. The medical examiner recovered one bullet lodged in her body. The examiner ruled that the cause of Gray’s death was homicidal violence, including the two gunshot wounds, asphyxia due to neck compression, and possible drowning.
