On a winter afternoon in 2021, three shooters fired 21 times into an SUV parked outside a Westwood apartment complex.
Three people were inside the vehicle, including a man prosecutors say the shooters had been hired to kill. That man was seriously injured but survived. Instead, a man who prosecutors said was “in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people,” 27-year-old Deontray Otis, was killed.
Otis’s girlfriend, who was sitting next to him in the front passenger seat, gave a harrowing account of what happened during testimony in the murder trial of a man prosecutors say hired the three shooters. Among them was a 14-year-old boy. And according to testimony, he used a gun that had an extended magazine.
On Thursday, a jury in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court will begin deliberations to decide whether they believe 23-year-old Carl Godfrey orchestrated that shooting and whether he was involved in another fatal shooting two days later. Godfrey faces more than a dozen counts, including aggravated murder, felonious assault and gun charges.