Accused Shell station ambush shooter found guilty of murder
- Jamie Duffy
- Mar 14
- 4 min read
Deputy Prosecutor Tasha Lee is someone to behold when she gets to closing arguments.
She’s a master at weaving her narrative through video and audio - in this trial a phone call from the murder suspect, Deondre Jones, to lead FWPD detective Nicholas Lichtsinn.
Lee was on point Friday (March 7) morning in Allen Superior Court Judge David Zent’s courtroom when she laid out the case against Jones, 29. Just hours later, he was convicted by the jury of shooting and killing Derrick Grandberry, 26, on Christmas Eve 2023.
It was a massacre-like ambush at the Tillman Road Shell station about a minute’s drive from the 19th Hole where both victim and shooter and their respective crews were viewed mingling on bar surveillance.
Jones was also convicted of two counts of attempted murder and criminal recklessness - “crim rec” because bullets were sprayed indiscriminately at the Shell station at East Tillman and Hanna Street that morning.
Police presented street camera video that showed Jones’ Lincoln MKX and a Ford Explorer meeting up on the streets prior to the shooting that took place around 3:05 a.m. The Explorer subsequently blocked the entrance to the Shell station as Jones’ MKX came alongside Grandberry’s car. Muzzle flashes from inside the Lincoln showed two shooters, according to Lichtsinn.
Javion Grandberry was driving a gray 2013 Chevy Impala, his cousin, Derrick Grandberry, in the passenger seat, and their childhood friend, Mandel Bedenfield, in the back, according to court testimony.
The trio went to the gas station to get some gas, Bedenfield testified in court. Neither he nor Derrick Grandberry were aware of any beefs that night.
“We was having fun,” Bedenfield said in court. Afterwards they were trying to decide “what we was going to do.”
During the attack, Bedenfield was shot five times - to his head, groin, thigh, stomach and shoulder - and was flown to Indianapolis for surgery, he said. Javion was shot in the head and hung on for five days before he died.
Derrick, in the passenger seat, returned fire and was not injured. He couldn’t remember hearing the shots, but noticed that his cousin was down and grabbed the wheel of the vehicle, he said in court testimony. The car accelerated and careened out of the Shell parking lot across Hanna, before crashing. The people in the Ford Explorer and the Lincoln MKX took off, leaving their deadly work behind.
At the 19th Hole and at the gas station, Jones appeared to advertise he had guns. In parking lot surveillance at the 19th Hole, he pulled out a rifle and handed it off, but not before taking a handgun from his waistband and wielding both guns.
Inside the Shell station, before the victim party arrived, Jones walked inside with a gun bulge on his right hip and outside, lifted his shirt to show the gun, store surveillance showed.
During the ensuing days, Jones repeatedly searched the internet for any clues he was in trouble, typing his name and “most wanted,” and looked to see if he had a warrant, a sure sign of guilt, Lee said.
For some reason, he called the Fort Wayne police and spoke with Lichtsinn who asked him pointed questions. The conversation was played in court. Jones denied partying at the 19th Hole on Christmas Eve and said he hadn’t been there since the Fourth of July.
And yet, there he was on bar surveillance with his pal, Trivel Crum, and two others.
The lie continued, Lee said, when he told Lichtsinn that he was with his kids that night and hadn’t gone out. But there was the cell phone data that placed him at the 19th Hole at 3:03 a.m. that morning and on Lafayette at 3:10 a.m. just north of Tillman.
It took less than 10 minutes to take a life.
Jones, represented by defense attorneys Nicholas Podlaski and Skip Campbell, met an ignominious end four days after the shooting when the FWPD tracked him down cowering in some overgrown bushes close to Drexel Avenue.
In the dark, police cameras caught him edging out of the brush under the fiery commands of the police. The arrest was part of the video presented in court.
Who would go hiding like that if he weren’t guilty? Lee wanted to know.
Podlaski attempted to destroy Lee’s powerful presentation by scoffing at the detective’s muzzle flash analysis.
“There was no evidence that he acted in concert with Trivel Crum,” Podlaski said, and if there’s reasonable doubt, then the jury must acquit. And anyhow, how did they even know that Javion would be heading to the Shell station after the bar’s 3 a.m. closing time?
Podlaski also criticized the surveillance video outside because it was foggy and the photos were grainy.
Even though two guns were used, no gun was found and no shell casings, a point Podlaski emphasized. But Lee shredded that, pointing out that the shooters had a couple of days to clear out the Lincoln MKX “before the cops showed up.”
Deputy prosecutor Rachel Gschwend, Lee’s second, handled some of the trial testimony. Lee took over both segments of closing arguments. Deputy prosecutor Matthew Skeens was also part of the prosecution team.
Jones’s codefendant, Trivel Crum, has already been sentenced to 155 years on the same charges, meaning he will serve each charge consecutively, one after the other.
Jones will have to wait until April 28 to find out the number of years he is due to spend at one of the state’s prisons.
It’s a horrible fate, but not when you compare it to the finality of the death sentence Javion Grandberry received when he drove into the Shell station on a Christmas Eve, probably unaware of what would happen in the next two or three minutes.
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