‘He got me’ were dying student’s last words after Dutch Fork and Lexington High game

A recent Dutch Fork High School graduate and former high school football player on Wednesday gave a harrowing account of the last minutes of 17-year-old Da’Von Capers’ life, which were spent in a parking lot of a Lexington eatery feuding with students from rival Lexington High School.

The confrontation only stopped when Capers and other Dutch Fork students stood at the open window of an SUV driven by Kierin Dennis, then 18, and Dennis shoved a knife into Capers’ heart.

“He said, ‘Marcus, he got me,” testified Kenneth Williams Jr., who stood to the rear of the group of students clustered around Dennis’s SUV.

Dennis is on trial for murder at the Lexington County courthouse this week for the Feb. 17, 2014, fatal stabbing of Capers, a Dutch Fork senior. The stabbing took place at the Cook Out, a fast food place in Lexington that is normally the hangout of Lexington High students.

But after a basketball game between the rival schools at Lexington High that night, a spirited game that Dutch Fork had won, the Dutch Fork students wound up going to the Cook Out. Only a few Lexington High students, including Dennis, showed up there.

Under questioning by assistant prosecutor Rhonda Patterson, Williams described how he saw Capers and the group of noisy Dutch Fork teens approached Dennis’s SUV, which had approached the Cook Out building at a fast rate of speed, then slowed down and stopped, scaring some students.

At that moment, tensions were already high. Minutes before, a truck driven by one Dennis’s friends had passed in front of the Dutch Fork students, and a Lexington student had thrown a fist full of dollar bills and change out the window and onto the asphalt. It was an insult to the Dutch Fork students, according to evidence in the case.

The Lexington student who threw the money on the ground had opened his vehicle window right in front of Williams, and Williams thought the window was being lowered so the person inside could shoot him.

“I thought, ‘it’s over with’. I dropped my phone. I was scared for my life,” testified Williams. The Lexington student tossed the money on the ground, and his vehicle moved about 20 yards away, where it stopped and a youth with what has been described as a crowbar or a pipe got out and just stood there.

That was when Dennis sped his SUV to where the group of agitated Dutch Fork students were, according to Wednesday’s testimony. The Dutch Fork students clustered around Dennis’s driver’s window and where there was “a lot of junk talking,” Williams testified.

Asked by prosecutor Patterson for a demonstration of how Dennis, who remained sitting in his driver’s seat the whole encounter, came to deliver Dennis a death blow, Williams left the witness and stood beside a real SUV door mounted on a stand to be the same height above the ground as Dennis’s door that night.

Standing at the demonstration SUV door, Williams then showed the jury how Dennis suddenly and quickly uncoiled his knife arm straight toward Capers.

As Capers fell back, Dennis pushed down on the gas and sped out of the Cook Out parking lot.

Later, Dennis defense attorney Todd Rutherford grilled Williams at length on exactly what he saw. Rutherford was apparently trying to show the jury that the deadly scenario that Williams had described to the jury had been physically impossible to carry out by someone sitting in Dennis’s driver’s seat.

Williams was one of six witnesses who testified on Wednesday, the trial’s third day.

Prosecutors continued to assemble what they hope will be a portrait of a killing so bad that it will be classified as murder – not any of the lesser charges associated with killing, such as voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. Murder carries a maximum life sentence penalty.

Rutherford is trying to show the jury that Dennis, who did not know Capers, acted out of fear for his life, and in any event, the killing – unlike murders by hardened criminals – was a spontaneous, unplanned act that his youthful client in no way intended to happen.

Due to numerous attorneys’ conferences and other delays, the trial – which had been expected to end Friday – appears likely to go into next week.

Judge Eugene Griffith ordered the trial to continue Thursday at 9 am.

This story was originally published October 5, 2016 at 5:16 PM with the headline "‘He got me’ were dying student’s last words after Dutch Fork and Lexington High game."