NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 26a0301n.06
No. 25-3672
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FILED Jul 13, 2026 FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT KELLY L. STEPHENS, Clerk ) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Plaintiff-Appellee, ) ON APPEAL FROM THE ) v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT ) COURT FOR THE ) GIANNI GRAY, NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ) OHIO Defendant-Appellant. ) ) OPINION )
Before: BOGGS, KETHLEDGE, and THAPAR, Circuit Judges.
BOGGS, Circuit Judge. Police observed three firearms while executing an arrest warrant
for Gianni Gray in his house. They seized the first two guns immediately, but left the third in place
until investigators returned later that day with a search warrant. Everyone agrees that the initial
search violated the Fourth Amendment because the arrest warrant was supported only by a bare-
bones affidavit. Our court previously suppressed the first two guns and remanded to the district
court for consideration of whether the third gun could be admitted under the independent-source
doctrine. Because investigators would have sought and obtained the search warrant even if the arrest
had never occurred, we affirm the district court’s denial of Gray’s renewed suppression motion.
I
A
This appeal concerns a felon-in-possession conviction, but the events giving rise to this
federal prosecution involve far graver crimes. On July 14, 2018, police responded to reports of a
double homicide at the intersection of Interstate 90 and West 117th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. No. 25-3672, United States v. Gray
Two victims, Andre Demetrius Williams, Jr., and Malachi P. Stewart, were found dead inside a
blue Chevrolet Cobalt. Investigators quickly identified Gianni Gray as a suspect. Three days after
the shooting, Detective Christina Cottom of the Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) applied for
an arrest warrant in state court. Her supporting affidavit stated in full: “On Saturday July 14th,
2018 at approximately 1924 hours at the location of W. 117th and I-90 West Bound exit ramp,
Gianni Gray did shoot and kill Malachia [sic] Stewart and Andre Williams while they sat in a car.”
R. 22-2, PageID 77. A deputy clerk of the Cleveland Municipal Court found probable cause and
issued the arrest warrant.
An anonymous tipster and a police report from a prior domestic-violence incident indicated
that Gray lived at 11016 Penfield Avenue in Garfield Heights at the time of the shooting. But the
police could not find him. Despite repeated efforts to apprehend him, Gray eluded capture for
nearly two years.
Finally, in April 2020, the Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force (“Task Force”)
received intelligence that Gray was living at 12113 Union Avenue in nearby Cleveland. The Task
Force corroborated the tip by surveilling the Union Avenue address and researching its property
records. While watching the house over several days, officers observed a man matching Gray’s
description and two women, including Wanda Buriguette-Downs, with whom Gray had had
children. Officers also learned that an LLC that listed Gray (using a known alias) as its registered
agent purchased the house in 2019 from Buriguette-Downs.
On the morning of May 5, CDP Sergeant Keith Haven was surveilling the house for the
Task Force. He watched as someone inside the house opened the front door for an unknown man,
who was smaller than Gray. “[S]trongly suspect[ing]” that Gray was living at the house, the Task
Force decided to execute the arrest warrant. R. 129, PageID 819. They assembled a team, knocked
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and announced their presence, and—after waiting for 20 minutes without any response—breached
the door. Once inside, the Task Force deployed a robot to search room by room for occupants,
with officers following closely behind.
Sergeant Haven proceeded upstairs and observed two guns in plain view. Concerned that
an occupant “could come back and obtain these firearms and use them against” the Task Force,
Sergeant Haven seized the guns, and a fellow officer removed them from the building. Id. at 824.
Sergeant Haven then heard “someone call out that they wanted to give up.” Ibid. Looking through
a hole in the floor, Sergeant Haven observed the unknown man who had entered the house that
morning emerging from a hiding spot with his hands in the air. A few moments later, Gray
appeared and surrendered too.
Both men were taken into custody, but the Task Force worried that other occupants and
firearms might have remained in the house. To guard against an ambush, officers conducted a
protective sweep of the rest of the house. They noticed a third gun in plain view in the basement,
but left it untouched and stationed an officer to secure the area.
Sergeant Haven notified Detective Cottom about the arrests and discoveries of firearms.
Detective Cottom prepared an application for a search warrant to “obtain any firearms in the
[Union Avenue] premises as well as any clothing, narcotics or electronic devices which may be
relevant to this investigation.” R. 108-1, PageID 698. Detective Cottom drafted a new affidavit
to support her search-warrant application, including much more detail this time.
The affidavit first recounted the evidence from 2018 that connected Gray to the double
homicide. On July 14, the day of the shooting, Detective Cottom interviewed an eyewitness who
observed the shooter firing from an Audi Q-5. Surveillance footage from a nearby business
confirmed the eyewitness’s account and showed that the car was “silver/gray.” Id. at 696. The day
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after the shooting, an anonymous tipster reported Gray as the culprit and said that police would
find an Audi parked in the driveway of Gray’s then-residence on Penfield Avenue. Sure enough,
a police officer who drove by the Penfield Avenue address “observed a gray Audi parked in the
drive with a garbage can in front of the license plate as if to conceal the license plate.” Ibid. The
officer could nevertheless read the plate and run it through a law-enforcement database, which
traced the car’s registration to a local Audi dealership. The same day, a different officer
interviewed the sister of Stewart, one of the murder victims, who shared that Stewart had warned
her that Gray had threatened to kill him in retaliation for the death of Gray’s brother. Anonymous
tips corroborated that motive, and prior CDP records listed Stewart as a suspect in the homicide of
Gray’s brother. Capping the inculpatory evidence, the affidavit noted that officers recovered the
Q-5 after Gray returned it to the dealership and discovered Stewart’s blood inside.
Detective Cottom’s affidavit next explained the evidence connecting Gray to 12113 Union
Avenue. She disclosed the April 2020 tip that Gray was living with Buriguette-Downs on Union
Avenue. The informant advised that Buriguette-Downs was known as “Star,” had one child with
Gray already, and was pregnant with a second. Detective Cottom researched Buriguette-Downs
on social media and located her account, which used the nickname “Star Bourne,” listed a son
named “Gray,” and indicated that she was pregnant. Id. at 697. Detective Cottom also wrote that
Buriguette-Downs had sold the Union Avenue property in 2019 to Gray’s LLC, yet that property
still appeared as Buriguette-Downs’s address in Ohio’s motor-vehicle records.
In Paragraph 18, the affidavit reported that the Task Force had arrested Gray at the Union
Avenue property and observed three guns inside. Other than this statement, Detective Cottom did
not explain why she believed that officers would recover guns at that address. A Cuyahoga County
-4- No. 25-3672, United States v. Gray
Court of Common Pleas judge issued the search warrant on May 5, 2020, and officers seized the
third gun later that day.
B
Gray was indicted in Ohio state court and eventually convicted of two counts of aggravated
murder, along with various lesser offenses. State v. Gray, 206 N.E.3d 842, 845 (Ohio Ct. App.
2023). He received a sentence of 84 years to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 70
years. Ibid. He did not challenge the Union Avenue searches in his state-court appeal.
Separately, on August 13, 2020, a federal grand jury sitting in the Northern District of Ohio
returned a single-count indictment charging Gray with possessing a firearm as a felon, in violation
of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). The indictment referenced all three firearms seized at 12113 Union
Street. Gray moved to suppress the three guns, arguing in part that they were fruits of an invalid
arrest warrant based on a “bare bones” affidavit. R. 22, PageID 67–69. The district court denied
his motion. Gray subsequently entered into a plea agreement, which contemplated that a
sentencing enhancement would apply for possessing three firearms. His plea agreement preserved
his right to appeal the district court’s denial of his suppression motion. The district court accepted
Gray’s guilty plea, applied the sentencing enhancement, and sentenced him to 63 months of
imprisonment, to be served concurrently with his undischarged state sentence.
Gray appealed his federal conviction, renewing his argument that the police unlawfully
seized the three firearms. The government confessed error with respect to the two guns found
upstairs and seized before Gray’s arrest, acknowledging that those seizures were the product of a
bare-bones affidavit. On the government’s motion, and without opposition from Gray, we vacated
the district court’s judgment and remanded with instructions to (1) suppress the two firearms seized
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upstairs and (2) conduct further proceedings regarding the third gun found in the basement. United
States v. Gray, No. 22-3883, 2024 WL 1513757, at *1 (6th Cir. Apr. 5, 2024) (order).
On remand, the district court conducted a second suppression hearing. Much attention
focused on the influence of fruits of the (unlawful) arrest warrant on the police’s decision to request
a search warrant. Sergeant Haven and Detective Cottom recounted the searches on May 5, 2020,
and explained the coordination between the Task Force and homicide detectives.
Both officers indicated that the plan all along was to seek a search warrant, regardless of
the results of the execution of the arrest warrant. Sergeant Haven testified that he “already had
knowledge” that homicide investigators “would obtain a search warrant in the location where
[Gray] was found and arrested.” R. 129, PageID 845. Detective Cottom went further, explaining
that she would have requested a search warrant even if the Task Force had not found Gray in the
Union Avenue residence that morning. Her knowledge about Gray’s connections to the property
and Buriguette-Downs, who herself had an outstanding arrest warrant, prompted her interest in
searching the residence. Detective Cottom acknowledged that she included the discoveries of Gray
and the three guns at the property in her search-warrant affidavit, but she believed that she would
have had probable cause even without that evidence (despite giving arguably contrary testimony
on cross-examination).
The district court denied Gray’s renewed suppression motion, finding that the independent-
source doctrine allowed the third gun into evidence. Gray again entered into a plea agreement and
preserved his right to appeal the district court’s suppression ruling. The district court accepted
Gray’s plea and resentenced him to 51 months of imprisonment (as before, concurrent with his
state sentence), a 12-month reduction from his original federal sentence because the three-gun
sentencing enhancement no longer applied. This timely appeal followed.
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II
Our limited task is to decide whether to suppress the third gun. While one might expect
that the admissibility of all three guns should rise or fall together, recall that the third gun was
observed during the execution of the arrest warrant, but (unlike the first two) was not seized until
investigators arrived with the search warrant. The question becomes whether the search warrant
independently supports the third gun’s admissibility. The district court answered yes. We review
the district court’s factual findings for clear error and its legal conclusions de novo, United States
v. Lester, 98 F.4th 768, 773 (6th Cir. 2024), and we affirm.
As a general matter, the exclusionary rule requires the suppression of evidence obtained in
violation of the Fourth Amendment. Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 536–37 (1988). But
for almost as long as the Supreme Court has recognized the exclusionary rule, it has also developed
“what has come to be known as the ‘independent source’ doctrine.” Id. at 537 (quoting
Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385, 392 (1920)). This doctrine seeks to put
“the police in the same, not a worse, position that they would have been in if no police error or
misconduct had occurred.” Ibid. (quoting Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 443 (1984)).
If the government establishes two conditions, the independent-source doctrine allows the
admission of evidence obtained through a search warrant despite the warrant application including
fruits from an earlier, unlawful search. See United States v. Cooper, 24 F.4th 1086, 1091 (6th Cir.
2022). First, the police’s “decision to seek the warrant” must not have been “prompted by what
they had seen during the initial entry.” Murray, 487 U.S. at 542. Second, the information obtained
during the initial entry must not have “affected” the magistrate’s “decision to issue the warrant.”
Ibid. The latter component asks not whether the illegally obtained information carried some
abstract persuasive effect, but rather whether that information altered the magistrate’s ultimate
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decision of whether to issue the warrant. United States v. Jenkins, 396 F.3d 751, 757–58, 760 (6th
Cir. 2005). In other words, we ask “if probable cause exists without the tainted information.” Id. at
760.
Starting with the first component, we evaluate the officers’ suppression-hearing testimony
and the context of the investigation to ask whether they would have sought a search warrant even
without the benefit of knowing what the illegal initial search revealed. See Lester, 98 F.4th at 776
(citing Murray, 487 U.S. at 540 n.2). Undoubtedly, the initial search confirmed two important
facts: that Gray indeed used the house and that the house contained firearms. But Detective
Cottom, the lead investigator, explained that she would have requested a search warrant regardless
of these two findings. Sergeant Haven testified similarly.
Granted, Detective Cottom had previously given an arguably contradictory answer to
Gray’s counsel during cross-examination. But the facts surrounding the investigation lend
credence to her clarification on re-direct that Gray’s arrest did not influence her strategy. Consider
that Detective Cottom had yet to apprehend Gray or recover the murder weapon despite searching
for nearly two years. Then, on the morning of May 5, 2020, she learned of a tip, surveillance, and
record evidence connecting Gray to the Union Avenue residence. She also had reason to believe
that Buriguette-Downs would likely have been at the property and possess information about
Gray’s whereabouts, even if Gray himself was not there. Most investigators would have pursued
these leads, so Detective Cottom’s testimony that she would have sought the search warrant even
without knowing who and what the Task Force had seen at the house was not “implausible.”
Murray, 487 U.S. at 540 n.2.
Resisting this conclusion, Gray invokes our unpublished decision in United States v.
Williams, 656 F. App’x 751 (6th Cir. 2016). In Williams, the police conducted a (lawful) search at
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one drug house and found keys that they suspected would open the door to a second drug house.
Id. at 752. Police had previously gathered evidence connecting the suspects to both addresses.
Ibid. Officers traveled to the second house and, before obtaining a warrant, opened the front door
with one of the keys. Ibid. Even though the officers would later testify that they would have
sought a search warrant for the second house even had the key not unlocked the door, the district
court found this post-hoc rationalization implausible and suppressed the fruits from the second
house. Id. at 753–54. We declined to find clear error in the district court’s analysis of the record.
Id. at 755.
Williams does not bind us, and we question its reasoning. After all, the fact that officers
had already gathered extensive evidence of the defendants’ criminal activity at the second house
seems to support their later testimony that they would have wanted to search that house regardless
of whether the key opened the door. See id. at 752 (noting that surveillance completed prior to any
searches “revealed that Williams and Gulley visited the [second] house, that the frequency, length,
and duration of these visits were identical to prior visits to other suspected stash houses, that
Williams and Gulley both had keys to open the front door of the residence, that no one appeared
to be living in the house, and that a Pontiac Montana—a vehicle suspected of trafficking drugs for
the organization—had regularly visited the residence”). An off-site officer “was already in the
process of preparing a warrant affidavit” before the on-site officers tried the key. Ibid. We question
whether the police really would have lost interest in investigating the second house had they not
had the key to open it.
But regardless of our doubts about Williams, the district court here drew the opposite
conclusion from the district court in that case. The district court here believed the officers’
testimony that they would have sought a search warrant even had the entry pursuant to the arrest
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warrant not uncovered Gray and the three guns. The district court did not clearly err by crediting
this testimony in light of the investigation’s recent developments tying Gray to the Union Avenue
house. The illegal initial search at Union Avenue did not prompt the police’s effort to procure the
subsequent search warrant.
We next consider whether the magistrate would have had probable cause to issue the search
warrant even without knowing what the initial search revealed. Unlike the preceding analysis of
whether the police would have wanted to search the house, which permits consideration of
testimonial evidence, this analysis of whether the police would have been authorized to search the
house “is concerned only with the statements contained within the affidavit.” Jenkins, 396 F.3d at
760. Paragraph 18 of Detective Cottom’s affidavit recited Gray’s arrest and officers’ observations
of firearms at 12113 Union Avenue, so “we must remove [that paragraph] from the affidavit when
considering whether there is still sufficient information to establish probable cause to search” the
residence. United States v. Davis, 430 F.3d 345, 357–58 (6th Cir. 2005).
Probable cause requires “a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be
found in a particular place.” Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 238 (1983). This standard does not
set a high bar, but it does require a nexus between the evidence of a crime and the place to be
searched. United States v. Sanders, 106 F.4th 455, 461–63 (6th Cir. 2024) (en banc). Stripping
the affidavit of Paragraph 18 does nothing to undermine the probable cause that Gray committed
the double murder on July 14, 2018, and lived at 12113 Union Avenue on May 5, 2020. The
affidavit established a nexus between Gray and the crime: it recounts eyewitness statements,
surveillance footage, corroborated tips, police interviews, law-enforcement records, and forensic
analysis that collectively placed Stewart’s blood in Gray’s car and identified a motive. The
affidavit likewise connected Gray to 12113 Union Avenue: it explained how the police
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corroborated several details supporting an informant’s recent tip that Gray had moved there with
Buriguette-Downs. See Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325, 331 (1990) (recognizing that if “an
informant is shown to be right about some things, he is probably right about other facts that he has
alleged”).
A more difficult question, however, concerns whether the affidavit also established a nexus
between evidence of Gray’s two-year-old crime and his new residence. Deleting Paragraph 18
expunges all of the direct evidence connecting Gray’s criminal conduct to 12113 Union Avenue.
But the absence of such direct evidence is not necessarily fatal, and it is not so here.
A “magistrate may infer a nexus between a suspect and his residence, depending upon ‘the
type of crime being investigated, the nature of [the] things to be seized, the extent of an opportunity
to conceal the evidence elsewhere and the normal inferences that may be drawn as to likely hiding
places.’” United States v. Williams, 544 F.3d 683, 687 (6th Cir. 2008) (emphasis added) (quoting
United States v. Savoca, 761 F.2d 292, 298 (6th Cir. 1985)). Applying this rule, we found a
sufficient nexus connecting two handguns to a suspect’s residence where an officer’s affidavit
contained facts alleging merely that the suspect lived at that address, possessed two handguns, and
had committed several recent offenses involving firearms. Id. at 685. Even without any evidence
directly tying the guns to the suspect’s house, we agreed with the government that “it is reasonable
to suppose that some criminals store evidence of their crimes in their homes, even though no
criminal activity or contraband is observed there.” Id. at 686–87 (citation modified). Similarly,
relying on a long line of gun-search cases demonstrating that the requirement of an evidence-
residence nexus “is not as onerous as it may appear,” we upheld a warrant to search for computers
at a suspect’s residence based solely on “the averment that he used one in the commission of a
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crime.” Peffer v. Stephens, 880 F.3d 256, 270, 273 (6th Cir. 2018). When searching for a gun,1 an
affidavit that establishes probable cause that the suspect has used a gun to commit a crime permits
a magistrate to “presume that there is a nexus between that object and the suspect’s current
residence, unless the affidavit contains facts that may rebut that presumption.” Id. at 270–71.
An additional complication arises because two years had passed, and Gray had moved,
between the commission of the crime and the request for the search warrant. The presumptive
nexus between a suspect’s gun and his residence “is subject to a staleness analysis.” Id. at 271 n.10.
When time has elapsed between the crime and the search, the suspect may have stored his gun
elsewhere or disposed of it altogether. Id. at 270. In considering whether the nexus between the
murder weapon and Gray’s residence had expired, we account for “the character of the crime
(chance encounter in the night or regenerating conspiracy?), the criminal (nomadic or
entrenched?), the thing to be seized (perishable and easily transferable or of enduring utility to its
holder?), the place to be searched (mere criminal forum of convenience or secure operational
base?),” and other variables. United States v. Spikes, 158 F.3d 913, 923 (6th Cir. 1998).
Although some of these factors may weigh in Gray’s favor, ultimately the nature of the
crime and Gray’s connections to the residence supported a fair inference that officers would find
firearms at 12113 Union Avenue. On the one hand, the crime alleged arose from an isolated
incident, and Gray had moved in the interim. But on the other hand, he had enduring utility for
his firearms. A magistrate could reasonably infer that Gray was eluding law enforcement and had
1 Of course, an inferential nexus between evidence and a suspect’s residence is less justifiable in certain cases, especially those involving drug trafficking. See Peffer, 880 F.3d at 272–73. This distinction lies in a commonsense observation that “unlike guns and computers that are used in the commission of a crime, when drugs are used in the commission of a distribution offense, the distributed drugs are no longer in the possession of the suspected distributor.” Id. at 273; see also Sanders, 106 F.4th at 461–66 (summarizing the many context-dependent ways in which the police can establish a nexus between evidence and the suspect’s residence, as well as the specific problems that arise in drug cases). The sole case Gray invokes to question the nexus to his residence comes from the drug-trafficking context, so it carries little weight here. See United States v. McPhearson, 469 F.3d 518, 524–25 (6th Cir. 2006).
- 12 - No. 25-3672, United States v. Gray
contributed to a pattern of retaliatory killings. And the Union Avenue address represented a secure
base rather than temporary shelter. After all, police confirmed a tip that the mother of Gray’s child
lived there, and that same tipster advised that Gray himself resided there too. Moreover, a
magistrate could reasonably infer that Gray had deeper connections to the Union Street address,
given that Buriguette-Downs sold the property in 2019 to an LLC registered in the name of Gray’s
alias. Perhaps most importantly, although the affidavit presented no evidence of Gray using a
firearm since July 2018, a two-year-old observational gap is not stale “given that firearms are not
perishable items.” United States v. Lancaster, 145 F. App’x 508, 513 (6th Cir. 2005); see also
United States v. Vanderweele, 545 F. App’x 465, 469–70 (6th Cir. 2013). All told, neither the
passage of time nor Gray’s single, local move rebuts the presumption of a nexus between the
murder weapon and Gray’s residence.
Stripped of the fruits of the invalid arrest warrant, the search-warrant affidavit still
presented probable cause to believe that Gray killed Stewart and Williams with a gun, that Gray
lived at 12113 Union Avenue, and that guns and other evidence of those homicides would be found
at that address. In a substantive sense, then, Paragraph 18 did not affect the magistrate’s decision
because an untainted affidavit would still have presented probable cause. See Jenkins, 396 F.3d at
760. The search warrant provided an independent source for the discovery of the third gun, so the
district court correctly declined to suppress it from evidence.
III
For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.
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