Anitra Gunn’s killer was a spurned boyfriend whose phone data may sink him, prosecutors say
In a brazen but imminently bungled effort to cover his tracks, prosecutors say the boyfriend now on trial in the 2020 killing of Fort Valley State University student Anitra LaShay Gunn went so far as to text her friends from her phone in the hours after he strangled her, but later confided to a friend that he was the one who’d slain Gunn.
Now it appears the friend, along with Gunn’s phone and his own cellphone’s data pings, will play leading roles in the case against Demarcus Devantae Little.
Other revealing details of the alleged crime also emerged for the first time publicly on Tuesday as testimony began here in Little’s murder trial.
Little, 25, an Augusta-based Army sergeant who grew up in Fort Valley and who met Gunn, 22, while she was a college student in his hometown, faces murder and aggravated assault charges. Benjamin Davis, Little’s attorney, has maintained his client’s innocence.
Gunn’s Valentine’s Day 2020 disappearance attracted statewide news coverage as the authorities and her loved ones searched for her. Four days after she vanished, a Peach County sheriff’s investigator, upon noticing some disturbed brush and grass along a country road less than two miles from Little’s home on the north side of Fort Valley, found Gunn’s body in pine thicket.
Gunn, a college senior majoring in agriculture, was from Atlanta.
Her death and the investigation into it is one of the highest-profile murder cases in recent Middle Georgia history. But until Tuesday not much was widely known about what the authorities believed happened to her.
However, prosecutor Neil A. Halvorson, in his opening statement to jurors in Peach Superior Court, described an at-times “toxic” relationship between Little and Gunn, a relationship “filled with control, threats, manipulation (and) possessiveness” on Little’s part.
Halvorson said the case against Little will include testimony from a close friend of Little’s, Jaivon Abron, who has told the authorities that Little admitted to killing Gunn.
It appears that statements from Abron — who has himself been charged with concealing Gunn’s death and making false statements to the police — have supplied prosecutors with their theory of why Gunn was killed.
Halvorson on Tuesday morning told jurors to anticipate evidence against Little to show that in the small hours of Feb. 14, 2020, “Demarcus had poured his heart out to Anitra, and she spurned him. She laughed. Demarcus Little then struck Anitra, hit her, and choked her — choked her to death, strangled her with his hands.”
Halvorson said that while Gunn was still missing, Little took Abron to the pine thicket in neighboring Crawford County where her body was dumped. Halvorson said the friends went there so that Little could retrieve the front bumper of Gunn’s 2013 Chevy Cruze. The bumper, Halvorson said, had been banged off when Little drove it into the woods to dump Gunn’s body.
The white bumper was found miles away, ditched by Little in an apparent attempt to distance it from Gunn’s remains, the prosecutor said.
More allegations
Other allegations Halvorson spoke of in court on Tuesday included prosecutors’ contentions that:
— On the night of Gunn’s death, she and Little had been at a party in Fort Valley with mutual friends, including Abron. In the wee hours of Feb. 14, 2020, Gunn and Abron went alone to a Waffle House in nearby Byron, leaving there at about 2 a.m. and returning to the house where Little was staying with his aunt on the north side of Fort Valley. The aunt, Halvorson said, saw the pair go into a bedroom, and it was there prosecutors believe Little killed Gunn.
— Later, Little allegedly placed Gunn’s body in the trunk of her car. Then, shortly before noon on Valentine’s Day, Little drove a 2019 Toyota Corolla into Fort Valley. He left his cellphone charging at his aunt’s place.
But with him, prosecutors contend, was Gunn’s cellphone. Early that afternoon, Halvorson said, a couple of Gunn’s friends began receiving “odd, unusual” text messages from Gunn’s phone. A friend of hers said Little denied sending the messages when confronted, saying instead that Gunn, by then missing, had gone out the morning of Valentine’s Day for a job interview.
Some of the bizarre text messages from her phone were received by a male friend of Gunn’s. The messages strangely asked where the guy lived and what he looked like. Before long, the friend would later tell the police, a car matching the description of Little’s Corolla — black with a red pinstripe — rode past him.
The friend was “so concerned” that he made sure to get its tag number, which Halvorson said turned out to be Little’s car, or at least one Little had access to. Shortly before noon on Valentine’s Day, messages and calls from Gunn’s phone ceased. The phone was later found in a drainage pipe near South Camellia Boulevard, a location that Little has also been linked to.
— Sometime after 1 p.m. on Feb. 14, 2020, Little got into Gunn’s car and left his aunt’s place at 420 Chestnut Hill. Her body was in the trunk, Halvorson said, and Little’s phone, now charged, was with him. The prosecutor said authorities would later use cellphone data to pinpoint the phone’s location, which for some 45 minutes was in the patch of woods where Gunn’s body would be found four days later. “Little’s phone will actually be one of the main witnesses against him,” Halvorson said.
— The prosecutor also noted that on the day before Gunn’s death, before the party that she and Little attended, Little had called or texted Gunn “at least 60 times.” He told jurors to note how such communications were “few after that.”
Testimony in the trial, which could last into the weekend, was set to resume Wednesday.
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 4:34 PM.