New evidence revealed at the sentencing of the Greenwood teen who shot and killed 15-year-old Kashius Davis puts the shooter in a new light.
Judge Peter Nugent on Friday sentenced Marcus Salatin to 825 days at a juvenile detention facility on a criminal recklessness charge, and 180 days to be served concurrently for a carrying a handgun without a license charge. Because Salatin has been incarcerated since the shooting last October, he will serve about 200 more days.
About 4 p.m. Oct. 30 in the Foxberry Trace neighborhood, Salatin fired multiple shots at a vehicle which carried three teens, including Davis. Salatin shot multiple rounds at the car, which killed Davis and injured another teen.
Based on statements made by the two teens who were in the car with Davis, the Johnson County Prosecutor’s Office initially charged Salatin with murder, criminal recklessness and carrying a handgun without a license.
But further investigation revealed the other teens had a “beef” with Salatin and brought Davis into it, according to new evidence presented Friday in Johnson County Superior Court 2 by Salatin’s defense attorney, Carrie Miles.
Miles presented SnapChat images and text messages which showed the teens had brandished guns online and repeatedly asked Salatin and his friend for Salatin’s address to confront him in person. Salatin and others were asked 37 times for Salatin’s address through SnapChat the day before the shooting, Miles said.
The teens eventually found Salatin’s address using online property records. One of the teens sent a photo of the online property record with Salatin’s mother’s name visible accompanied by a video of one of the teens firing a gun, she said.
Messages also revealed the teens had previously assaulted Davis in a parking lot several months prior to the October shooting. Referring back to that fight in a SnapChat message, one teen said he would do worse when they met in Salatin’s neighborhood, Miles said.
Messages show the teens recruited Davis to go with them and didn’t give him the full story of what they intended to do. Davis got wrapped up in the other teens’ problems with Salatin, and that resulted in his death, she said.
In the 30 minutes prior to the shooting, the juvenile driver drove around the neighborhood, while Salatin hid behind houses, trying to keep the likely gun fight away from his own home and his parents, Miles said. Salatin was being “hunted” by the teens, she said.
Salatin came out from behind the houses when he thought the teens had left, but they had not. The car pulled up to Salatin and rolled down a window, Miles said.
Salatin thought he saw something come out the window and started shooting, she said.
“Today was important for Marcus because he has been deemed publicly to be a murderer and he is not,” Miles said. “He absolutely acted in self-defense.”
Whether the teens actually had a gun will never be known, but that’s irrelevant because the evidence shows Salatin had a clear reason to be afraid for his life and his family’s lives, she said.
Though the story is vastly different than what the teens first told police and attorneys in their depositions, the Johnson County Prosecutor’s Office felt it was important to hold Salatin accountable for shooting a gun in a neighborhood and illegally obtaining the gun he used in the shooting, said Joe Villanueva, prosecutor.
Salatin entered an open plea agreement last month to criminal recklessness and possession of a handgun without a license.
Villanueva said Salatin should serve more time in detention because all previous attempts by the juvenile justice system to rehabilitate him have not worked. He outlined different programs and therapies that were tried to no avail.
Since age 12, Salatin has had 10 cases against him in juvenile court, including six battery-related charges, Villanueva said.
Most recently, Salatin was convicted in the juvenile justice system for possession of a firearm on Oct. 8, just 22 days before the shooting. He was put on juvenile probation and did not learn from his mistakes, as he obtained another gun which was used to shoot Davis, he said.
While detained for this crime, Salatin displayed disregard for rules of the detention center and was involved in a battery incident that prompted a temporary, punitive transfer to the Johnson County jail, Villanueva said.
Due to his continued inability to learn from the programs, and his bad behavior while detained for the past 197 days, Villanueva asked Nugent to sentence Salatin to more time.
Miles asked Nugent to send Salatin home and submitted a letter to the judge in which he expressed a desire to get on a better path going forward. She said his good grades while in detention are evidence he is ready to move forward and chalked up his misbehavior in detention to him learning how to cope with the fact that he took a life.
Salatin’s mother, Angie Salatin, also spoke in his defense at the sentencing hearing Friday.
Despite her son’s criminal history, she said he has a good heart and has the potential to change.
He needs to be home, go back to school, eliminate bad influences and stay away from the dark persona he has created for himself on social media, Angie Salatin said.
Upon her son’s release, she and his father will be more diligent than ever about helping him get on the path toward finishing high school and getting a job, she said.
Before handing down the sentence, Nugent said flatly he does not believe Salatin wants to change, based on the evidence presented.
“Actions speak louder than words,” Nugent said.
Salatin’s history with the juvenile justice system and his behavior in juvenile detention are aggravating factors, while his age and guilty plea are mitigating factors, he said. Weighing those together, he arrived at the sentence.
Nugent admonished all adults and parents in Johnson County for giving juveniles the freedom to commit serious adult crimes.
“I’m not mad at you,” he said to Salatin. “I’m mad at us.”
With social media and substances facilitating recent gun violence among young people, Nugent said he is concerned that adults aren’t doing enough to correct behavior before it goes too far.
“Social media is the toilet of the internet but we can’t turn it off,” he said.
After the sentencing, Davis’s family members who attended the hearing were disappointed but resigned to the outcome.
Several of them protested the plea agreement earlier this month outside the Johnson County courthouse, and have shared publicly their disapproval of Villanueva’s efforts on the case.
“The social media evidence presented by the defense today provided more insight than I was able to share earlier about how and why this case ended up where it did,” Villanueva said in a statement. “My goal was to do what I could to salvage what was left of the case and hold Salatin accountable to our community to the fullest extent the law would allow. Based on Judge Nugent’s sentence, I believe we accomplished that.”
The prosecutor’s office plans to pursue potential criminal charges against the teens who were in the car with Davis during the shooting, and uncooperative during the investigation. There is no timeline yet for when charges may be filed.
Davis’s mother and grandmother bolted after the sentencing Friday.
“I believe a lot of things surfaced as far as Kashius being innocent in all of this, but he is the only one who isn’t here anymore,” Davis’s grandmother, Donna Poole, said later. “I don’t think for one minute Kashius knew the crap that (the teens) were into. … The only thing Kashius was guilty of was being loyal to (one of them) because he thought (one of them) was his friend.”
Davis’s grandfather, Kenny Poole, is upset that, after so many brushes with the law, Salatin has seemingly made no progress.
“The system has failed since he was 12 years old, and now we lost our grandson … We had so many more years with him,” Poole said. “Look at what he lost.”
Editor’s note: The Daily Journal is not identifying the two teens who were in the car with Davis when he died because they have not been arrested or criminally charged.
