A filing in the criminal case of two men charged in the March 2, 2024, shooting death of mail carrier Jonte Davis, 33, describes an eyewitness calling 911 after seeing the shooting, describing a “black right hand holding a gun that fired approximately five shots toward the carrier.”

Davis was in his U.S. Postal Service vehicle at Olive Avenue and Scott Street in Warren, just northeast of Courthouse Square. The vehicle the person was shooting from was a four-door, gray pickup truck with a light-gray stripe near the tailgate.

The witness told a U.S. postal inspector the next day the truck had tinted windows and was “possibly a Dodge.” The truck drove “up to the side of the postal vehicle so that the rear passenger side of the pickup truck was parallel to the postal carrier before the shots were fired,” the document states.

The witness “positively identified a photograph recovered from a neighbor’s Ring camera with 100% certainty as the truck used during the murder,” the filing states.

Kaprice Sledge, 25, of Warren, and his father, Thomas Sledge, 45, of Youngstown, are charged federally with murder of a federal employee and discharging a firearm during a violent crime in the 1:44 p.m. homicide. If convicted, both could receive life in prison. No decision has been announced by the government as to whether it will seek the death penalty.

As previously reported, a few hours after the shooting, the suspect vehicle was found near a home at 429 Maryland Ave. NE. The Mahoning Valley Crisis Response Team served a search warrant, and evidence was recovered, including the vehicle. Police said the victim and the suspect or suspects knew each other.

The new document states that Warren police officers canvassed the neighborhood in the hours after the shooting, looking for witnesses and security camera footage They found footage from an Olive Avenue home that captured the gray pickup truck driving down Olive Avenue at the time of the shots.

Warren police detective John Greaver then learned that a truck matching the description from the murder was “associated with Kaprise Sledge” and that Sledge owned a gray 2013 Dodge Ram pickup truck. The truck was located about 5:15 p.m. near the house at 429 Maryland Ave. NE.

The new filing was submitted in response to three motions to suppress filed in December by attorney William Norman, who represents Kaprise Sledge.

One is suppression of “cell site location information” that provides information about the movement of cellphones possibly associated with the murder. Norman said the evidence should be excluded because of flaws in the March 5, 2024, search warrant that was used to secure cell site location information.

Norman also asked that information be suppressed that was obtained through a search of Kaprise Sledge’s cellphones, saying the searches were a violation of Sledge’s Fourth Amendment rights against having his phones searched “without probable cause or exigent circumstances.”

The defense motion stated that Kaprise Sledge was stopped in Warren for minor traffic violations — speeding and reckless operation — May 16, 2024. He was arrested, and his cellphones were seized. Officers obtained a search warrant for the phones but failed to provide sufficient probable cause to arrest Sledge at that time, the defense filing stated.

The third request for suppression related to the Automated License Plate Reader system used to obtain evidence against Kaprise Sledge, the defense stated. “The government accessed expansive ALPR databases and performed a search of Sledge’s recent vehicle movements without a warrant, judicial oversight or exigent circumstances,” the defense alleged. The filings asked U.S. District Court Judge Donald C. Nugent to dismiss all charges against Kaprise Sledge.

The Feb. 9 government filing by U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio David Toepfer and three assistant U.S. attorneys states that all three motions allege violations of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The 33-page prosecution filing argues that the government did have probable cause to ask for the cellular phone data — a so-called “tower dump” — associated with Davis’ death. It cited the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court Carpenter v. United States ruling in which the nation’s top court “expressly declined to decide whether individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in ‘tower dumps'” and “whether there is a limited period for which the government may obtain an individual’s historical CSLI free from Fourth Amendment scrutiny.”

The March 5, 2024, affidavit filed to explain the request for cellphone tower information stated that “Davis was shot multiple times in the 600 block of Olive Avenue Northeast at approximately 1:46 p.m. Law enforcement officers recovered multiple (bullet) shell casings from the street and bullet fragments from the (U.S. Postal Service) delivery vehicle,” the document states.

The affidavit mentioned the Ring doorbell in the “700 block of Olive Ave. NE captured a 2013 gray Dodge Ram pickup truck passing the residence in the direction of the homicide seconds before the shooting.” The affidavit stated that a U.S. postal inspector found that the “suspect vehicle and suspect arrived in the area of the shooting sometime between 1:30 p.m. and 1:46 p.m.” and that the Ram truck’s travel to the Maryland Avenue Northeast residence ended between 1:35 p.m. and 1:50 p.m.

The prosecution filing states that the affidavit did establish a link between a specific cellphone and a specific crime. The affidavit did not give a specific cellphone number, but that was because the “point of the warrant was to find out what devices were present at both critical locations at the critical times listed,” the new filing states.

As to the defense request for suppression of evidence seized from Kaprice Sledge’s cellphones during his May 16, 2024, arrest, the prosecution filing states that a Warren police officer was traveling on Youngstown Road in a cruiser with a radar system when the system alerted him near Woodbine Avenue that a Dodge Challenger was traveling 65 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone. He turned around, and the Challenger accelerated. The officer activated lights and siren and caught up to the vehicle at Ridge Road, making a traffic stop on Kaprice Sledge.

The officer could smell burnt marijuana coming from inside the Challenger.

The officer asked Sledge to step out of the car and placed him under arrest for reckless operation. A search of the vehicle revealed marijuana residue, a few marijuana “roaches” and medical marijuana packages, the filing states. Sledge was charged with speeding and reckless operation, both misdemeanors. Two phones were removed from the vehicle and were taken to the police station as evidence. The vehicle, which was titled to another male, was towed to the impound lot, where the owner later retrieved it.

The traffic stop was “supported by probable cause and lawful under the Fourth Amendment,” the filing states. “A warrantless arrest is reasonable if the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect committed a crime in the officer’s presence,” even if the offense is a “minor crime,” the filing states.

As to the defense request to suppress evidence related to use of an Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) to help find the Dodge Ram pickup truck suspected of being used in the homicide, the prosecution filing states that in the hours after the homicide, Warren Police Detective John Greaver retrieved a security image of the pickup truck about 2:45 p.m. March 2, 2024. At between 3 and 4 p.m., Greaver was notified by another officer that a truck matching the description of the Dodge Ram pickup truck was “involved in narcotics activity and was associated with Kaprise Sledge,” the filing states.

Greaver learned that Sledge owned such a vehicle. About 4:30 p.m., Greaver learned that an FBI agent asked the Niles Police Department to search its Flock automated License Plate Reader camera system for the Dodge Ram pickup truck. A short time later, Greaver received a photo of the Dodge Ram with the same license plate as Sledge’s from a Niles police detective, who said the photo was taken March 1, 2024, at 1:25 p.m., about 24 hours before the shooting. About 5:15 p.m. March 2, 2024, Warren Police Detective Pete Goranitis told Greaver he found the Dodge Ram pickup truck behind the 429 Maryland Ave. NE address and that a “known associate” of Kaprise Sledge lived there. Greaver obtained a warrant to search the vehicle and the home. The vehicle was towed to a police storage facility.

The prosecution filing challenges the defense’s assertion that the Warren Police Department relied on Niles Flock camera “to identify Kaprise Sledge’s truck, to obtain location metadata or to trace his vehicle to specific addresses.”

It states that “Rather, an eyewitness to the murder provided law enforcement with a physical description of Kaprice Sledge’s truck” and corroborated that with a Ring camera image” taken seconds before the shooting.

“Contrary to Defendant’s motion, none of these investigatory techniques used an ALPR (Flock camera) or cell-site location technology,” and the techniques used are lawful, the prosecution filing states.

The trial in the case is set for 8:30 a.m Aug. 17 in U.S. District Court in Cleveland.