Shortly after 10 p.m. on February 18, 2016, 17-year-old Timothy Miller, who had just come home from his job at Little Caesars Pizza in Highland Park, Michigan, got a phone call from a number he did not recognize. Someone asked Miller to “come smoke with them.”
Miller replied, “No, I don’t know you. I don’t smoke anymore.”
A few minutes later, Miller decided to take his dog out. He peeked outside the door and saw a person about 12 feet away, walking up his driveway while pulling a hood over his head. Miller later recalled that the person raised a silver handgun and began shooting at him.
Miller ran to the basement. He heard more gunshots and then saw the gunman at the top of the basement steps. He heard a gunshot, and a bullet whizzed over his head. A second shot struck him in the chest.
Minutes later, Miller’s mother found him and called 911. Miller woke up in the hospital after he emerged from surgery.
Meanwhile, at the scene, police collected six bullet fragments and eight shell casings. A police firearms and toolmark analyst would later testify that all the casings had been fired from the same weapon.
About that time, Miller’s sister, Erica, arrived at the home. When police asked her who she thought might be responsible, she suggested 16-year-old James Travis, a childhood friend of Miller’s. They had lived within a block of each other and went to the same elementary school.
In August 2014, Travis and two other childhood friends, J.D. and J.P., had confronted Miller, who was then 14. Miller was beaten. Charges had been filed in juvenile court against Travis, J.D., and J.P. Miller testified against J.P., who was convicted and sentenced to a period of confinement in a juvenile facility. Travis pled guilty to assault and was sentenced to probation, which he completed successfully.
After Erica spoke with the police, she went to the hospital. When Miller emerged from surgery and woke up, she suggested that Travis was responsible for the shooting.
The following day, February 19, 2016, Miller told a detective about the phone call he received just before the shooting from someone who sounded like Travis, though the caller called himself either Thomas or Malcolm. Miller said he believed Travis was the gunman because he knew Travis to have a gray hoodie.
Police obtained a search warrant for Travis’s home address on Hazelwood Street in Detroit where he lived with his mother. Nothing of evidentiary value was found. The gun used in the shooting was never located.
On February 21, Travis turned himself in to the police when he learned he was wanted. He was arrested based on Miller’s identification. He was charged with assault with intent to commit murder, first-degree home invasion, retaliating against a witness, felony assault, and felony firearm. Police also obtained a search warrant for Travis’s cell phone.
In July 2016, he went to trial in Wayne County Circuit Court and chose to have the trial judge decide the case without a jury.
Miller testified about his testimony against J.P. in juvenile court. He said that after that trial, Travis had shown up at the Little Caesars where he worked on five different occasions. On three of those occasions, Travis called Miller a snitch or took photographs of him to post online. Otherwise, they did not have any contact with each other, though they sometimes saw each other in the neighborhood.
Miller said the shooter was wearing a gray hoodie with blue lettering, black pants, and blue shoes. Although the lighting outside was “pretty dim,” he said he could “still kind of see from the moonlight.”
He admitted that he initially told the detective that he did not get a good look at the shoes the gunman wore, but testified that the shoes were blue Chuck Taylor brand. He said, “[T]he more and more I thought about it, the more and more I became aware of what he was wearing, what he looked like.” Miller said based on that, he concluded that Travis was the gunman.
In his defense, Travis presented five alibi witnesses: his uncle, Ernest Travis; Ernest’s partner, Dajohnna Maye; his father, James Travis Sr.; his father’s partner, Mia Halloway; and Anthony Duncan, his cousin.
Each of these witnesses testified that Travis was visiting his father on the west side of
Detroit, approximately 10 to 12 miles away from Miller’s house, the entire night of the shooting.
Between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight, at the time of the shooting, Travis was
on his phone, playing video games with his family members, eating food, and playing with
his little brother.
James Travis Sr. testified that at the time of the shooting, he was homeless and stayed the night at different places. He said he arrived at 17664 Fenton Street on February 14, 2016. The home belonged to his cousin, Anthony Duncan, who lived a couple of houses down on the same
street.
He said that his son was off school from February 15 to February 19 for mid-winter break and that Travis stayed with him at the Fenton Street home from February 16 until the evening of February 19.
On February 16, 2016, around 7:30 p.m., according to Ernest and Maye, they picked Travis up from the home on Hazelwood where he lived with his mother and brought him to the house where his father was staying on Fenton Street.
All of the witnesses testified that Travis did not leave the home at any point during his time there.
According to the testimony, Travis’s cousin, Rue, drove Travis home on the evening of Friday, February 19. At the time, Travis did not have a driver’s license, and no one at the Fenton Street address had a car.
In rebuttal, Stan Brue, a contractor with the Detroit Police Department’s Homicide Section, testified that had analyzed Travis’s cell phone call records. Brue analyzed cell phone tower data for Travis’s phone number between February 15 and February 18, and prepared a chronological analysis of the calls and text messages sent and received on the night of the shooting.
Brue created a map that depicted the ten-and-a-half miles between 17664 Fenton Street, where Travis was staying with his father, and the address where the shooting occurred.
Brue also created a report that purported to illustrate the various cell towers that Travis’s phone interacted with during that period. Brue testified that during the time frame of February 15 to 18, 60 percent of the communication events occurred outside the “home sector” – away from Fenton Street. However, when asked to focus on the days that Travis was at the Fenton Street address, the proportion of outside communications dropped to eight percent.
Brue testified that between 9:56 p.m. and 11:49 p.m. on the day of the shooting, no calls
or texts were sent or received by Travis’s phone. Brue referred to this as a “two-hour period of inactivity,” which he concluded “was a change of the normal calling pattern for this target telephone.”
Based on his experience in analyzing phone records “relative to criminal activity,” Brue testified that the two-hour period of inactivity was significant because, in his experience, phone inactivity is “probably the number one method where someone that commits crime tries to retard the efforts of law enforcement in that investigation.”
On July 22, 2016, Circuit Court Judge Michael Callahan found Travis guilty of all the charges.
“So the question becomes, did the prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the alibi was not accurate and/or false and that the defendant was somewhere else?” the judge said as he rendered his verdict.
“All of the testimony from the defense alibi witnesses say that the defendant was present at the street – house on Fenton – and was constantly using his phone between the hours of 10 p.m. and 12 p.m.,” the judge said. “A few other details in the alibi were given, but the prosecutor has proven that the defendant was not on Fenton because the phone wasn’t in use at the operative time that the alibi witnesses said that James Travis was using his phone.”
Callahan sentenced Travis to 23 years to 50 years in prison with a consecutive sentence of two years for the felony firearm conviction.
In March 2022, Travis’s attorney, Katherine Marcuz, from the State Appellate Defender Office, who was handling Travis’s appeal, engaged an expert in cell phone forensics and cell phone records analysis and mapping.
Subsequently, the Michigan Court of Appeals granted Marcuz’s motion to remand the case back to the trial court for a hearing to determine whether Travis’s trial defense attorney had provided an inadequate legal defense by failing to conduct an independent investigation of the cell phone records.
At the hearing on May 24, 2024, before Circuit Court Judge Chandra Baker-Robinson, Patrick Siewert, Director of Digital Forensics for Archer Hall, a national provider of digital forensic services, testified that Travis’s phone was used only near the Fenton Street address from the evening of February 16 to February 19, 2016.
And contrary to the prosecution expert’s finding, Travis’s phone was not inactive at the time of the shooting, Siewert testified. In fact, Siewert said, at the time of the shooting, Travis was in the middle of a four-hour long phone call with a girl. Siewert said the call’s beginning and ending location were the same and were consistent with the phone being at or near the Fenton Street address.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Chandra-Robinson vacated Travis’s conviction. The judge noted that Travis’s trial defense attorney apparently didn’t even review the prosecution’s report from Brue.
“And even if he did, he didn’t know what he was doing,” the judge said. “And he didn’t get anybody to help him find out what he was doing. So, that being the case, the Court finds that he was ineffective, and the Court will grant a new trial.”
Attorney Gabi Silver was appointed to represent Travis at a possible retrial. He was released with an ankle monitor on June 15, 2024. On November 25, 2024, the prosecution dismissed the case.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 04-22-2025
Last Update Date: 04-22-2025
