Investigators combined phone records, surveillance images, drone photography and mail-scanner data to retrace the hours surrounding Jont’e Davis’ killing.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A trail assembled from cellphones, security cameras, a postal scanner and drone imagery helped federal prosecutors win murder convictions against an Ohio father and son in the 2024 killing of letter carrier Jont’e Davis, who was shot while working his Warren delivery route.
A federal jury found Kaprise Sledge and Thomas Sledge guilty Sept. 3 of murder of an officer and employee of the United States and using, carrying and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence. The verdict followed nearly two weeks of trial testimony before U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent. Prosecutors said the defendants aided and abetted one another in the premeditated killing of Davis, 33, and had followed him for about 90 minutes before he was shot.
The investigation began with information far less technical than the evidence that would later dominate the trial. After gunfire struck Davis while he was in his postal vehicle on Olive Avenue Northeast on March 2, 2024, an eyewitness called 911 and described the pickup involved. That description focused attention on a gray Dodge Ram. Authorities later confirmed the truck was registered to Kaprise Sledge, according to the Justice Department, giving investigators a vehicle they could search for across private and public camera footage.
Surveillance recordings allowed investigators to begin building a timeline. Cameras at several locations caught the pickup before and after the shooting. Prosecutors said the collected footage showed the truck tracking Davis’ mail vehicle as he continued along his route. One image introduced by the government was described as showing Kaprise Sledge in the rear seat. By comparing the truck’s appearances with Davis’ work movements, prosecutors argued that the vehicle had not simply crossed paths with the postal carrier shortly before the shooting but had remained around his route for roughly an hour and a half.
Finding the pickup provided investigators with another geographic point. The Dodge Ram was located behind a house at 429 Maryland Avenue Northeast, approximately a mile from the shooting scene. Postal inspector Joshua Gardner testified that he flew a drone in the neighborhood hours after Davis was killed. Jurors were shown imagery in which the truck could be seen in the backyard near the rear of the property rather than along the street. The location later became part of Gardner’s effort to determine which mobile devices had been present both near the homicide scene and where the vehicle was recovered.
Gardner testified that he quickly began writing search warrants to AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Rather than requesting only the records of people investigators already suspected, he sought information identifying devices that met geographic and time-based conditions. One request covered devices detected within about 150 meters of the shooting location and the Maryland Avenue property. It also included limited periods before and after the shooting and the later discovery of the truck. According to Gardner’s testimony, the resulting records narrowed the field to three devices.
Two of those devices were associated with Kaprise and Thomas Sledge, Gardner told jurors. Prosecutors incorporated those records into a larger reconstruction that they said placed both men in the relevant area. They also introduced evidence concerning Thomas Sledge’s movements earlier that day, arguing from his phone data that he had been elsewhere before returning toward his son’s Warren property shortly before Davis was killed. The government treated those records as corroboration rather than presenting them alone, pairing them with camera images and the movements attributed to the Dodge Ram.
The defense attacked that analysis at its foundation. Attorneys argued that the location process relied on by the government had not been adequately validated for the conclusions prosecutors wanted jurors to draw. Thomas Sledge’s lawyer said cellular providers themselves caution against treating network data as a precise location tool. He also highlighted evidence that did not directly link his client to the truck: Thomas Sledge did not appear in surveillance images of the vehicle, his DNA was not found inside it and he was not identified through an investigative tip line. The defense argued that proximity inferred from digital records was not the same thing as proof of participation in murder.
Kaprise Sledge’s defense raised a related timing issue. His attorney acknowledged that the government had footage placing Kaprise in the pickup at one point but emphasized that about 87 minutes separated that sighting from the fatal shooting. That interval, the defense argued, left room for uncertainty about who was in the Dodge when it reached Davis. The dispute put the government’s ability to link separate data sources at the center of the trial: the prosecution needed jurors to accept the timeline as a whole, while the defense urged them to treat each piece as limited and potentially inconclusive.
Investigators had an unusually detailed record of the victim’s movements because of Davis’ job. The electronic device he carried to scan mail logged location information as he worked. A postal inspector testified that those points could be viewed as “bread crumbs” marking where the carrier had traveled. The records allowed authorities to reconstruct Davis’ route independently of the defendants’ phones. Prosecutors could then compare the mail-scanner trail with surveillance appearances of the gray pickup and cellular records associated with the Sledges.
The scanner evidence also generated a separate line of testimony about a package delivered the previous day. Davis’ work data showed that he had delivered a package weighing about 15 pounds to a property the government said belonged to Kaprise Sledge. The shipment was not addressed to Sledge. A postal inspector testified that its Northern California return address had been associated with mail-order marijuana shipments. But cross-examination exposed an important limit: the inspector did not know the contents of the package. The government has not publicly identified a confirmed motive for Davis’ murder, so the shipment cannot reliably be described as the reason for the killing.
While the trial relied heavily on electronic evidence, witnesses from the neighborhood supplied the immediate account of the shooting. Residents testified about hearing gunfire and seeing a pickup around the postal vehicle. One witness described Davis’ truck rolling afterward until it hit a stop sign. Police and emergency responders arrived and performed lifesaving measures before Davis was taken to Trumbull Regional Medical Center, where he died. The eyewitness reports established the violent event that prosecutors then sought to connect to the longer sequence preserved by cameras and digital devices.
Federal authorities did not charge the Sledges immediately. A grand jury indicted them in October 2024, months after investigators had gathered video, phone and postal records. Both pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors later elected not to seek the death penalty, leaving life imprisonment as the maximum punishment on the murder charge. The case eventually reached a jury in August 2026, more than two years after the shooting. By then, the investigation that began with a 911 description of a gray pickup had become a detailed presentation of devices, timestamps, camera locations and vehicle movements.
The jury’s guilty verdicts mean the dispute now shifts from proof of responsibility to punishment. The federal murder count carries up to life in prison, and the firearm count has a mandatory minimum term of 10 years with a maximum of life, according to the Justice Department. Nugent is scheduled to sentence the Sledges on Dec. 10 after considering the federal sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors. The Postal Inspection Service and Warren police led the investigation, with support from the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force, a county drug task force and local emergency management officials.
Author note: Last updated October 20, 2026.