Stevenson & Thomas v. United States

District of Columbia Court of Appeals·Decided March 19, 2026·No. 24-CF-0428 & 24-CF-0496·Published

Opinion

Notice: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the Atlantic and Maryland Reporters. Users are requested to notify the Clerk of the Court of any formal errors so that corrections may be made before the bound volumes go to press.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF APPEALS Nos. 24-CF-0428 & 24-CF-0496 DELONTA STEVENSON & VORREZE RICARDO THOMAS, APPELLANTS, V.

UNITED STATES, APPELLEE.

Appeals from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (2021-CF1-000968 & 2021-CF1-000967)

(Hon. Marisa J. Demeo, Trial Judge)

(Argued December 18, 2025 Decided March 19, 2026)

Brian D. Shefferman for appellant Stevenson.

Cecily E. Baskir for appellant Thomas.

Mary C. Fleming, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Jeanine Ferris Pirro, United States Attorney, and Chrisellen R. Kolb, Miles Janssen, and Zachary Horton, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellee.

Before BECKWITH, MCLEESE, and DEAHL, Associate Judges.

DEAHL, Associate Judge: Appellants Delonta Stevenson and Vorreze Thomas were charged with various counts stemming from the shooting of three occupants of a car: Troy Williams, James Fye, and Terrence Allen. Williams and Fye survived

the shooting, but Allen was killed. Both appellants were convicted of assault with intent to kill as to Williams and Fye, first-degree murder as to Allen, and a variety of related offenses. During their joint jury trial, the government relied on extensive surveillance video footage and other circumstantial evidence to identify Stevenson and Thomas as the two men who shot and killed Allen. The government also relied on expert testimony from a firearms examiner that purported to match a firearm, found abandoned near the men’s crashed vehicle after a police chase, to the casings left at the scene.

Stevenson and Thomas challenge their convictions and contend that it was reversible error for the trial court to admit the firearms examiner’s testimony. Stevenson also contends the trial court erroneously limited defense counsel from arguing in closing about the societal prevalence of a blue puffer jacket worn by one of the shooters that resembled a jacket that Stevenson wore in various photographs admitted into evidence. As we explain below, we assume for the sake of argument that the trial court committed the first error and agree with Stevenson that it committed the second, but we nonetheless conclude that any errors were harmless. We thus largely affirm appellants’ convictions, with several exceptions noted below regarding some of the firearm charges that the government agrees should be vacated.

I. Background

We begin a few months before the shooting at issue, when appellant Delonta Stevenson was shot by an unknown assailant in November 2020. Stevenson and his girlfriend, Brianca Phillips, believed Troy Williams was the culprit, and Williams knew as much. Williams started feeling “a little tension” with Stevenson after the shooting and began avoiding the Stanton Glenn apartment complex, where both Williams’s mother and Stevenson lived.

After a few months passed, Williams braved a trip to Stanton Glenn to check on his mother and take her to the grocery store. He asked Terrance Allen for a ride and to bring a gun because he was still worried about his fallout with Stevenson. Allen picked up Williams and brought a friend, James Fye. When the group arrived at Stanton Glenn, Williams tried talking to some “dudes in the parking lot,” though “a couple of them walked away . . . in different directions.” That led Williams to believe it was still dangerous for him to be there, so he, Allen, and Fye quickly retrieved Williams’s mom and took her to a grocery store.

Around that same time, several text messages were sent to Brianca Phillips’s cell phone indicating that Williams was at Stanton Glenn. Phillips’s phone then made a twenty-seven-second call to somebody dubbed “Lil V” in her phonebook— a nickname for Vorreze Thomas. Surveillance video from a nearby gas station

showed a man who the government maintained was Thomas taking a twenty-seven- second phone call around that same time. He was wearing red sneakers, tight jeans, a black face mask pulled down below his face, and a navy parka jacket with a fur- lined hood. After the call, the man left the gas station in a green Volvo SUV, which Thomas was known to drive.

About twenty minutes later, Williams returned to Stanton Glenn with his mother, Allen, and Fye, and the events that followed were captured on surveillance footage from the Stanton Glenn complex. That footage shows the same green Volvo from the gas station pulling into the complex seconds after Allen’s car. The driver of the green Volvo—still wearing the same outfit he wore at the gas station—parked near a man standing by the parking lot wearing a blue puffer jacket, dark pants with red stripes, and a black ski mask or “balaclava.” The government maintained this was Stevenson. The video shows the Volvo driver grab a tactical rifle with two grips from the backseat of his car while the man in the blue jacket holds a pistol, and the two of them look toward the car that Williams was riding in. Meanwhile, Williams dropped his mother off at her apartment, got back in Allen’s car, and drove toward the apartment complex’s exit. The two men the government maintained were Stevenson and Thomas then got into the green Volvo and likewise drove toward the complex’s exit.

As Allen’s car reached the exit, Williams saw the green Volvo speeding toward them and told Allen to drive faster, but a parked car whose driver had briefly exited was blocking the exit path. The surveillance footage shows Allen trying to drive around the parked car, but he hit a concrete bollard separating the lanes of incoming and outgoing traffic. The green Volvo then pulled up directly behind Allen’s crashed car, and the Volvo’s occupants fired over thirty rounds into the back of the car. Williams testified that he tried firing back with the gun Allen brought, but it jammed. Allen was shot and killed. Fye and Williams were also shot, but both survived.

Special police officer Adjawo Sani was on duty near a kiosk positioned at the entry/exit of the Stanton Glenn complex, and he witnessed the shooting. After the shooting, Sani fired three shots from his service pistol at the Volvo as it sped away. It just so happened that at the same time Sergeant Michael Millsaps of the Metropolitan Police Department was driving by Stanton Glenn in the opposite direction of the Volvo, and surveillance video shows him making a U-turn and chasing after the Volvo. Millsaps explained that he chased the Volvo for about four minutes before he eventually lost track of it in a residential area. After shaking Millsaps, the green Volvo promptly crashed into a nearby parked car, and its occupants bailed out.

A witness heard the crash and saw two men in dark clothing exit the car and run towards a wooded area, and the man exiting from the passenger side was carrying a rifle. Minutes later, surveillance cameras at a bank drive-through show the same men, wearing the same distinctive outfits seen on video at Stanton Glenn, approaching the bank from the direction of the wooded area without the rifle. The pair walked through the bank drive-through and across the parking lot of an adjoining Safeway. They then boarded a metrobus, as seen on the bus’s surveillance video.

Stevenson and Thomas were arrested and charged with: (1) conspiracy to murder Williams; (2) first-degree murder while armed of Terrence Allen; (3) two counts of assault with intent to kill while armed of Troy Williams and James Fye; (4) and three counts of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence (PFCV). Stevenson was also charged with two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm (prior conviction and offenses committed while on release), D.C. Code §§ 22-4503(a)(1), 23-1328(a)(1). Thomas was also charged with carrying a rifle or shotgun outside of the home or place of business. Id. § 22-4504(a)(1), (a-1).

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