An Ohio doctor was shot dead in her own living room in an attack that prosecutors say her 18-year-old daughter arranged after the two argued about household chores.
Tamela Dutcher, 55, was sitting on the couch at the family’s home in Delaware County, north of Columbus, when two men pushed inside shortly after midnight on Aug. 14 and fired a single shot, according to court records and local station WBNS.
Her husband ran toward the sound. The intruders shot at him, missed and fled, officials said. Dutcher was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
Christian Evans, 20, and Dajameous Payne, 21, have been charged with aggravated murder. So has Dutcher’s daughter, Bryanna Dutcher, who also faces a count of obstruction of justice.
A relationship kept secret
Investigators say the younger Dutcher had been seeing Evans without telling her parents, whom she described in a police affidavit as deeply racist, because she believed she would be thrown out of the house if they learned she was dating a Black man.
On the night of the shooting, after the argument with her mother, she texted Evans about it, according to the affidavit. “If I were you, I would have killed her,” he allegedly replied.
Evans and Payne then waited outside the house for about 15 minutes while she confirmed where each parent was, prosecutors say. She allegedly texted that her mother was in the living room and her father in the basement. Evans replied that they were pulling on gloves and would “take them both out at the same time.”
Other messages recovered from her phone included the lines “once they both pass away” and “also I believe you should also get a gun,” police said.
Investigators say she misled them
In the hours after the shooting, the affidavit says, Bryanna Dutcher first told officers she had seen no one, then pointed them toward a friend of her mother’s who owed her money. Police wrote that she “repeatedly lied to law enforcement,” delaying the identification of suspects.
Evans was later seen dropping a bag containing a gun holster and a pair of pants into a dumpster outside his apartment, investigators said. His father told police he had received a text from his son that night, and phone data placed Evans near the Dutcher home at the time of the shooting.
Research that reads differently now
Dutcher had co-authored a paper on adolescent violence more than two decades earlier. Writing with Daniel Davis in the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health in January 2002, she noted that while the overwhelming majority of juveniles arrested for homicide are boys, the small number of girls who kill tend to kill relatives.
An indictment accuses the three of acting “purposely, and with prior calculation and design.” All are being held in the Delaware County Jail.
On Friday, a lawyer for Evans filed a suggestion of incompetency, arguing that he is not currently fit to stand trial and should be examined by a physician while in custody.
Reporting in this story is based on court records, a police affidavit, and coverage by the New York Post, WBNS and Oxygen. The photograph is a stock file image, not a photograph of the events described.
