They Killed the Witness to Stop the Trial. The Jury Convicted Anyway.
On the morning of September 29, 2023, Kristopher Lewis parked at his job on Trade Street in Lexington, Kentucky. According to the United States, three masked men got out of a dark sedan that had been waiting in the lot and shot him. He was a federal witness, and he was scheduled to testify.
Transcript
Cold open
At about a quarter past eight on the morning of September twenty-ninth, two thousand twenty-three, a man drove to work on Trade Street in Lexington, Kentucky.
He parked. He got out of his car.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
According to the United States, three masked men got out of a dark sedan that had been sitting in that lot for some time, and shot him.
A commercial truck was parked nearby with a camera running inside the cab. It did not record the shooting. It recorded the sound of it, and then it recorded the sedan leaving.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
The man's name was Kristopher Lewis. He was a witness in a federal criminal case, and he was scheduled to testify.
What the record holds
S1
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
This is what the public record says about who is accused of killing him, and why. Almost none of it has been decided.
Everything here comes from federal court filings in the Eastern District of Kentucky. Indictments. Detention opinions. Briefs. Orders signed by judges.
S13
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 1 · 2025-10-02.
Eight people are charged. Not one of them has been tried. There is no verdict in this case, and as of this week there is not even a trial date.
Where the government alleges something, this video says the government alleges it. That distinction is going to matter more than usual, because the record here is unusually detailed and almost entirely untested.
The Hot Boyz
Start with the group at the center of it.
S15
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
In October of two thousand twenty-five, an F.B.I. special agent named Isaac Robison testified at a detention hearing in Lexington. He described a criminal street gang called the Hot Boyz.
S46
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 221-1 · 2026-03-16.
The court wrote down what he said. A gang in Lexington, Kentucky, responsible for shootings, drug trafficking, homicides, robberies and other crimes.
S16
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
He named seven self-identified members. Boone. Sharp. Parks. Bellomy. Dixon. Doolin. And Chance Gist.
Four of those seven are charged together in the murder case. Most of the rest, the court noted, were facing separate federal charges of their own.
Chance Gist is dead. The government's own filing refers to him, in brackets, as a now-deceased member.
The record does not say when the Hot Boyz began. No filing in this case gives a founding date, and no witness is quoted giving one.
Four incidents
S19
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
What the record does carry is a run of incidents, and the earliest of them is April of two thousand twenty.
That month, according to that testimony, Boone and Sharp came to the home of a woman the court identified only by her initials. Both men were armed.
Sharp tried to fire at her. The weapon did not go off. She got in her car and drove, and as she drove he got several rounds away at her.
She identified both men. Sharp was charged in state court. Deangelo Boone was never charged with anything arising from that morning. She told police she did not believe he had fired.
S20
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
December twenty-eighth, two thousand twenty. Jaquise Ray, the brother of Sharp, was murdered on Woodhill Drive in Lexington.
Police were called separately to another road that day, and recognized a man who had been at the Woodhill Drive scene. He appeared to have a gun in his shirt. He got into a car Deangelo Boone was driving.
The car ran. It hit a curb. The men inside got out and went on foot.
S21
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
Boone and Sharp were found inside an office building. They had climbed into the ceiling of a doctor's office. Police surrounded the building and eventually took them out of it.
From the car, officers recovered an A.R.-fifteen pistol, a small A.K.-forty-seven, and a Glock twenty-six.
S22
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
Five days later, on January third of two thousand twenty-one, someone shot at a house on Radcliff Road in Lexington.
The house belonged to a member of the Sleet family. The court wrote that the Hot Boyz and the Sleet family have a known gang rivalry, and that the rivalry has resulted in several murders.
A witness inside the house said they believed Deangelo Boone was responsible. The government could produce no evidence for that. The judge said so plainly, and discounted it.
That is worth pausing on. In an opinion that ordered a man detained, the court went out of its way to say which allegation it was throwing out.
The group chat
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
By two thousand twenty-three the group had a text thread. Investigators pulled it off two phones.
August nineteenth, two thousand twenty-three. William Dixon writes: Aye gang everybody bout to start moving in twos when we go out. We da mob on mama.
Sharp, the same day: if those two hadn't been with me I would have boxed both of them. And then, separately, a line about killing.
S18
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
The judge who read all of this also noted something less cinematic. A large part of that same group chat was about a basketball video game.
They played N.B.A. two-K. They gambled on it. One of the screen names in a photograph of the game was Hot Boyz underscore Doja. Doja was Deangelo Boone.
That is the texture of this record. Threats to kill, and a video game lobby, in the same thread, on the same night.
Lamar's first case
Now the other half of the story, which starts in a different courtroom, a year earlier.
L2
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
In April of two thousand twenty-two, a federal complaint charged a man named Rollee Deshawn Lamar with conspiring to distribute marijuana.
When agents came to his residence with a search warrant, Rollee Lamar did not answer the door. He said he had to make phone calls. Officers forced their way in.
L3
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
They found him covered in insulation, coming out of an attic. In the attic was over a million dollars in cash.
L4
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
The phones in his pockets were badly smashed. They had been working a short time earlier. In the police car afterward, he tried to break the window.
The release
L1
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
The government asked the court to hold him. Not on general dangerousness. On a specific theory: that if he were released, he would obstruct justice.
The magistrate judge assigned to it was Matthew Stinnett. He held a hearing, then ordered both sides to brief two legal questions before he would rule.
The questions were narrow and they mattered. When the government asks for detention on an obstruction theory, can the court weigh everything else it knows about the defendant, or only the obstruction?
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E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
Judge Stinnett concluded that he could weigh only the obstruction. He walked through the statute, the legislative history, and the case law, and he ruled against the government on the scope.
Then he applied that narrow lens to the evidence.
L4
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
The attic, the smashed phones, the police car window. Judge Stinnett called these a reflexive desire to avoid immediate detection, rather than a plan to interfere with a court proceeding.
Then he added a footnote. And the footnote is the reason this is not a simple story about a judge who got it wrong.
L5
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
Footnote seven. The Court notes that it would likely view and weigh this conduct differently if it were permitted to undertake a general danger-to-the-community analysis.
He is saying, on the record, in April of two thousand twenty-two, that the law is stopping him from considering something he would otherwise consider.
L6
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
The strongest evidence the government had was a jail call. Rollee Lamar had directed someone to remove jewellery and a hidden vehicle key from his property.
The judge agreed that was real obstruction. But the government could not say whether the watch had already been seized, or what was in the storage unit, or that any of it was drug money.
L7
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
On April twenty-seventh, two thousand twenty-two, the court released him. Home detention. G.P.S. monitoring. And restrictions on contact with witnesses and co-defendants.
L8
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
Denies the Government's oral motion for pretrial detention, and releases Defendant.
Signed, Matthew A. Stinnett, United States Magistrate Judge.
The witness
S23
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
Kristopher Lewis was charged in that same case.
In early two thousand twenty-three he pleaded guilty, and he agreed to cooperate.
In July of two thousand twenty-three he went before a grand jury. His testimony produced a superseding indictment against Rollee Lamar.
Kristopher Lewis was due to be sentenced that same July. His sentencing was pushed back, so that he could testify at Rollee Lamar's trial first.
That continuance, the court later wrote, combined with the discovery handed over to the defence, revealed to Rollee Lamar that Kristopher Lewis was cooperating against him.
There is no mystery in this record about how the danger became visible. It became visible through the ordinary paperwork of a criminal case.
Three days in September
S33
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
What the government says happened next occupies three days.
September twenty-sixth, two thousand twenty-three. Cell-site records place William Dixon in the same area of Louisville as Rollee Lamar.
That evening, at about half past eight, William Dixon texts Desmond Bellomy. Answer the phone. We got something on the floor.
S34
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
The following evening, just before six: Is it a go. And then: I done got everybody ready.
These are the government's readings of the government's exhibits. No jury has weighed a single one of them.
On the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth, cell records put William Dixon and Desmond Bellomy near Kristopher Lewis's home and near his workplace.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
On the twenty-eighth, William Dixon sent the group a licence plate number. It was Kristopher Lewis's.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
His cell records put him near the workplace when he sent it. Kristopher Lewis's timecard shows he was at work.
The car
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
The car they were using for that surveillance did not belong to any of them.
S49
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 154 · 2025-12-01.
It belonged to Casey Morris, who the government says was in a relationship with Desmond Bellomy.
She had hidden a second phone inside her own car so she could track where it went.
She was not tracking a murder. She was checking whether he was at another woman's house.
S35
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
He was. What follows in the record is an argument by text message.
She writes that she needs her car. He writes back: gotta learn his schedule need this money.
She replies, not knowing what she is replying to: sitting in the house ain't gon learn nobody's schedule either.
On the evening of the twenty-eighth she took her car back. According to the government's account, that made the group angry, because they had planned to use it.
S39
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
Law enforcement believes that is the moment a man named Quinseeno Waide was brought in. Sometime very late on the twenty-eighth, or very early on the twenty-ninth.
In the small hours of September twenty-ninth, William Dixon and Desmond Bellomy texted about picking each other up, and about where the gloves were.
September twenty-ninth
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
At about eight fifteen in the morning, Kristopher Lewis arrived at work.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
He was gunned down in the parking lot as he reported for his shift.
His fiancée identified him at the scene. She told police she believed Rollee Lamar was responsible, because of the cooperation.
She said that on the first day.
What the cameras kept
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
The investigation that followed ran on machines.
Lexington police queried Flock camera data. Those are automated licence-plate readers, mounted on poles, photographing every car that passes.
They asked the system for black sedans moving in the early hours. It returned a black Acura that Sharp was known to drive.
It was the only vehicle on the network that morning matching the description.
S32
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
Shell casings from the lot went into a federal ballistics database. Nine millimetre and forty calibre.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
They matched two earlier shootings. One on Race Street in March of two thousand twenty-three. One on Charles Avenue in September of two thousand twenty-two.
A black Acura appeared on video at both.
After the killing, the Acura was found abandoned in a parking lot on the south side of Lexington.
S37
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
That afternoon, cell records place William Dixon and Rollee Lamar in the same area of Lexington.
Shortly after, according to the government, William Dixon began posting photographs of himself with thousands of dollars in cash. Parks and Bellomy posted with money too.
The money
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 260 · 2026-06-09.
And that evening, at twenty-five past seven, two of them worked out the payroll.
Sharp writes: we gonna give Fred, probably, a hundred each. Fred, the government says, is Quinseeno Waide.
William Dixon: yup, and Doja said give him five. Doja is Deangelo Boone.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
Then Sharp writes the line the government has built a great deal on. Either way, it was two hundred and fifty dollars each, from the four of us.
Four. The government says four men were in that lot on Trade Street. Sharp. Dixon. Bellomy. Parks.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
There is no mention of Kristopher Lewis anywhere in those messages. The defence has pointed that out. The judge who read them agreed the texts were ambiguous, and detained the man arguing it anyway.
The trial happened anyway
All of that is allegation. Here is something that is not.
Rollee Lamar went to trial.
L9
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 170 · 2026-01-07.
On February twenty-ninth, two thousand twenty-four, five months after Kristopher Lewis was shot in that parking lot, a jury convicted him.
Conspiracy to distribute a thousand kilograms or more of marijuana, and distribution.
L10
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 170 · 2026-01-07.
He appealed. The Sixth Circuit upheld the conviction.
If the government's theory is right, then the killing accomplished nothing at all. The trial went ahead. The jury convicted. The appeal failed.
A man was killed to stop a trial, and the trial went on without him.
Thirty-nine days later
G2
E.D. Ky. · 3:24-cr-12 · Dkt. 1 · 2024-10-17.
Thirty-nine days after the shooting, two of the men now charged with it were stopped in Shelby County, Kentucky.
November seventh, two thousand twenty-three. A traffic stop, extended by state troopers, and a police dog.
In the car were a Glock seventeen and a Glock twenty-three.
G1
E.D. Ky. · 3:24-cr-12 · Dkt. 1 · 2024-10-17.
Almost a year later, in October of two thousand twenty-four, a federal grand jury in Frankfort indicted Desmond Bellomy and William Dixon for possessing them as convicted felons.
They both moved to suppress the search. Judge Stinnett recommended denying both motions. The district judge agreed and denied them.
That gun case was set for trial six separate times across two thousand twenty-five. It never happened.
In November of two thousand twenty-five it was continued generally, pending the resolution of the murder case. It is still waiting.
The man who would not sit down
S39
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
Which brings us to the eighth defendant, and the strangest chapter in the file.
Quinseeno Waide is charged with one count. Accessory after the fact. The government says he helped the four men get out of the murder vehicle and into a clean one.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
In August of two thousand twenty-four, his probation officer set up a meeting. Quinseeno Waide did not know what it was for.
He was told his name had come up. He denied any involvement with the Hot Boyz and said they were family friends. When the officer mentioned payments and photographs, he asked for a lawyer, and it stopped.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
A month later the United States Attorney's Office sent him a target letter, inviting him to come in and discuss a resolution before charges. He did not answer it.
In April of two thousand twenty-five, police came with a warrant for his phone. He went inside his house and stayed there for about twenty-five minutes.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
When they searched the house they found a firearm, ammunition, and his phone. The phone had been factory reset.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
That month detectives told him the United States would be seeking the death penalty in the Lewis case, and that he was looking at life in prison or something higher.
He asked for a lawyer again.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 254 · 2026-05-19.
In May of two thousand twenty-five he was charged with possessing a firearm after a misdemeanour domestic violence conviction. He pleaded guilty. In January of this year he was sentenced to fifteen months.
S45
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 221-1 · 2026-03-16.
And in between, in August of two thousand twenty-five, the prosecutor on both cases wrote an email to his lawyer.
Quote. Waide's best chance at avoiding charges in the Lewis homicide, or any future Hot Boyz case, would be to sit down with us and tell us exactly what he was asked to do.
If he can credibly persuade us that he did not know what he was assisting with, we would likely not charge him in the Lewis case.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
He did not sit down. On November sixth, two thousand twenty-five, the superseding indictment added him as the sole defendant on the accessory count.
His lawyers moved to dismiss, arguing the charge was retaliation for his refusal to talk. A vindictive prosecution.
S48
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 265 · 2026-06-23.
On May nineteenth of this year, the court denied that motion. In July it denied his motion to be tried separately. Days later he was ordered detained.
In that detention opinion the court asked whether a person is measured by the company they keep, and answered that while it is not wholly determinative, it is difficult to overcome.
Nine other shootings
S47
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 273 · 2026-07-09.
His own filing contains a number the government has never had to prove. Members of the Hot Boyz have been named as suspects, charged, or convicted in nine other shootings or homicides.
One of them was the shooting of a Lexington police officer.
That sentence sits in a defence brief, arguing that this material is too prejudicial to put in front of a jury. It is not a charge. It is not a finding. It is a lawyer describing the discovery he was handed.
What the government wants
S2
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
So what does the government actually want here.
S9
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
The superseding indictment carries a Notice of Special Findings. That is the machinery of a federal capital case.
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E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
It alleges, defendant by defendant, that they were over eighteen, that they intentionally killed, that they planned it, that they did it for money.
S11
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
For Rollee Lamar the finding is different in one word. Procured. That he procured the commission of the offences by payment, or promise of payment.
S8
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
And the indictment carries one more thing. It notes that he was on pretrial release when it happened, under an order dated April twenty-seventh, two thousand twenty-two.
The government put Judge Stinnett's release order in the charging document, by date and by case number.
S12
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
The penalty page for counts one through four reads: death, or life imprisonment.
Seven of the eight defendants are eligible. Quinseeno Waide is not.
Eligible is not the same as sought. Under Justice Department policy, only the Attorney General of the United States can authorise seeking a death sentence, and there is an internal review before that happens.
Where it stands
S51
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 280 · 2026-07-24.
That decision has not been made.
The trial was originally set for December second, two thousand twenty-five. It did not happen, and the reason is that everything is waiting on that one decision.
S50
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 275 · 2026-07-10.
Then, this month, the judge changed.
S52
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 280 · 2026-07-24.
On July tenth, Judge Gregory Van Tattenhove, who had held the case since it was filed, retired. It was reassigned to Judge Karen Caldwell.
S51
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 280 · 2026-07-24.
On July twenty-fourth, two days before this video was finished, she entered an order.
She vacated five scheduling orders. She continued the trial generally, as to all defendants, pending the Attorney General's decision on whether seeking the death penalty is appropriate.
And she ordered the parties to propose a new trial date within five days after that decision comes.
So there is no trial date. Not because anything has been resolved, but because nobody in Washington has yet said whether they will ask a Kentucky jury to sentence six men to death.
What is still buried
Here is what is still buried.
S45
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 221-1 · 2026-03-16.
Nine other shootings and homicides sit in a defence brief with no names attached and no charges filed. The government has said it is continuing to investigate the Hot Boyz' racketeering activities. It has not brought that case.
S16
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
Zaylan Doolin was named as a member in open court. So was Chance Gist. Chance Gist is dead. Neither is a defendant here.
And there is the question the record raises and cannot answer.
L5
E.D. Ky. · 5:22-cr-50 · Dkt. 14 · 2022-04-27.
In April of two thousand twenty-two a federal magistrate wrote that the law did not let him weigh what he would otherwise weigh, and released a man on G.P.S. monitoring with orders not to contact witnesses.
S24
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 76 · 2025-10-30.
Seventeen months later a witness in that case was shot dead in a parking lot before work.
Whether those two facts are connected is exactly what a jury has not been asked yet.
S1
E.D. Ky. · 5:25-cr-127 · Dkt. 86 · 2025-11-06.
Every one of the eight is presumed innocent. The marijuana conviction of Rollee Lamar is a conviction. So is the gun conviction of Quinseeno Waide. Nothing about the killing of Kristopher Lewis has been decided by anyone.
The files are public. The docket number is five twenty-five, criminal, one twenty-seven, in the Eastern District of Kentucky. Everything in this video is in it, and it is still open.
Sources
- [S1] *United States v. Dixon*, No. 5:25-cr-00127, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky, Central Division at Lexington — Superseding Indictment, Dkt. 86, filed 2025-11-06. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71950210/united-states-v-dixon/
- [S2] Same case — Indictment, Dkt. 1, filed 2025-10-02 (six defendants).
- [S3] Same case — Memorandum Opinion & Order (detention, def. Boone), Dkt. 76, filed 2025-10-30, Magistrate Judge Matthew A. Stinnett.
- [S4] Same case — United States' Response to Motion to Sever, Dkt. 260, filed 2026-06-09.
- [S5] Same case — Opinion & Order denying motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution (def. Waide), Dkt. 254, filed 2026-05-19.
- [S6] Same case — Memorandum in Support of Motion to Dismiss (def. Waide), Dkt. 221-1, filed 2026-03-16.
- [S7] Same case — Memorandum Opinion & Order denying severance, Dkt. 273, filed 2026-07-09; and Reply, Dkt. 265, filed 2026-06-23.
- [S8] Same case — Memorandum Opinion & Order (detention, def. Morris), Dkt. 154, filed 2025-12-01.
- [S9] Same case — Order of reassignment, Dkt. 275, filed 2026-07-10; and Order, Dkt. 280, filed 2026-07-24, Judge Karen K. Caldwell.
- [S10] *United States v. Lamar*, No. 5:22-cr-00050, E.D. Ky. — Release Opinion and Order, Dkt. 14, filed 2022-04-27, Magistrate Judge Matthew A. Stinnett. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68655517/united-states-v-lamar/
- [S11] Same case — Memorandum Opinion & Order, Dkt. 170, filed 2026-01-07.
- [S12] *United States v. Bellomy*, No. 3:24-cr-00012, E.D. Ky., Central Division at Frankfort — Indictment, Dkt. 1, filed 2024-10-17, and docket entries through 2025-11-18. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69815074/united-states-v-bellomy/
- Nobody has been tried. As of the last docket entry, 2026-07-24, there is no verdict and no trial date in 5:25-cr-00127. All eight defendants are presumed innocent of every count. The two convictions named in the video — Lamar's 2024 marijuana conviction and Waide's § 922(g)(9) firearm conviction — are identified as convictions and are unrelated to the killing itself.
- The death penalty has not been sought. Seven defendants are capital-*eligible* because of the Notice of Special Findings. The Attorney General has not authorised seeking a death sentence, and DOJ policy requires an internal review first. The episode says so.
- The "nine other shootings" figure comes from a defence brief, characterising discovery the government produced. It is not a charge, a finding, or a government count. The episode attributes it to the filing it appears in and does not treat it as established.
- The Radcliff Road allegation was rejected by the court, which wrote that the United States "could not produce any evidence to support that allegation." The episode reports the rejection alongside the allegation.
- The record gives no founding date for the Hot Boyz. The earliest conduct traceable in these filings is April 2020; the earliest sworn description of the group as a gang is Robison's October 2025 testimony. Some news outlets have called the group the "West End Hot Boyz"; that fuller name appears in no filing reviewed here, so the episode uses the court's term.
- Not used: the 97-page transcript of the December 17, 2025 Morris motion hearing (Dkt. 196) contains extensive testimony about a third party's alleged use of a relative's law-enforcement position. That relative is not accused of anything, and naming him would carry an implication the record does not support. Also omitted: the residential locations of every defendant and witness, all of which appear in these public filings.
- PACER-only material was not obtained. Everything above is in RECAP or on the public docket. No credentials were used.