How a weekend crime lab shift helped crack broad daylight killings outside mall
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BATON ROUGE – New information released to the WBRZ Investigative Unit on Friday shows the speed and focus of Baton Rouge Police detectives working to make an arrest after the high-profile, afternoon drive-by shooting outside the Mall of Louisiana at the end of February.
Two teenagers were killed in a barrage of gunfire – a targeted killing police believe was part of dispute between gangs.
Demetriyon Grim was arrested and booked into jail on murder charges Thursday. There will likely be other arrests. Police said the investigation was still active and would not elaborate in a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Friday, WBRZ obtained an initial report on Grim’s arrest. The document spells out some of the investigation and how Grim was tied to the shooting.
Some of the document is hidden from view – blacked-out paragraphs hide clues that police used to track Grim and that will likely be used to connect future suspects and arrests.
The drive-by shooting was on Friday, February 25. Police had identified a DNA profile of one suspect, Grim, by the next day – Saturday, February 26. Detectives had a search warrant for Grim’s DNA by Monday.
But Grim wasn’t swabbed for DNA until a month later, when he was arrested on other charges on March 29. DNA confirmed a match on April 8.
Grim had murder charges added Thursday, April 14, to the others he’s facing for unrelated crimes.
Detectives wrote in arrest documents that Grim and others tailed the victims — 18-year-old aspiring rapper Donte Dorsey a.k.a. TrueBleeda, and 19-year-old Clifton Lindsey — from a vehicle later ditched. Lindsey and Dorsey were shot and killed while driving in a car at the corner of Bluebonnet Boulevard and Picardy Avenue. After abandoning the first car, police said the shooter or shooters then used a second car to flee the area.
Inside the abandoned car, police found significant DNA later tied to Grim.
Grim was previously arrested a year before the shooting. WBRZ profiled his past in a story first published Thursday evening on WBRZ.com here.
On Friday, sources told WBRZ that Grim also goes by the name "Dubugg" and has suspected ties to the "Banks Town Mafia," a gang recently targeted in a law enforcement crackdown that ended with 10 arrests in East Baton Rouge.
Records also revealed that Grim was closely associated with Malecah Demoulin, a man who was booked for murder in 2020 after a deadly shooting at a N Ardenwood Drive apartment complex. Demoulin was never formally charged with the killing, and in 2021 — about a year after Demoulin was released — he was killed in a double shooting at a Holiday Inn on Airline Highway.