DNA and a baseball cap helped Phoenix investigators find a suspect in a two-year-old murder case, court documents have revealed.
Steven Rashaad Deloach, 31, was arrested on Wednesday afternoon and has been booked into jail on a single count of first-degree murder, following the shooting death of Dominic Daughtrey, in 2022.
Daughtrey, 39, was sitting in his truck in the parking lot of Phoenix apartment complex with his friend when a man approached their truck, AZ Family reports.
The man allegedly said that Daughtrey had beat up and used a stun gun on one of his friends. A group of people began approaching the truck, which prompted Daughtrey’s friend to step out and attempt to de-escalate the situation.
Court documents claim that Deloach was “lying in wait” in the breezeway of the apartment complex, before he allegedly emerged and shot Daughtrey multiple times.
Daughtrey died at the scene of the shooting and Deloach allegedly escaped into an SUV, losing his baseball cap in the process.
When police questioned Daughtrey’s friend, he told them he was too intoxicated at the time of the shooting to accurately identify his friend’s killer.
Over the course of their investigation police learned from Daughtrey’s sister that he had gotten into a fight with a man named Ras and used a stun gun on him during that fight. They later learned that Deloach allegedly used the nickname Ras.
In 2023, police spoke with Daughtrey’s friend again, who said he might know the shooter, but was afraid to identify him over concerns for him and his family’s safety.
Later that year, Deloach was arrested for beating his girlfriend. When investigators questioned her, she told them that Deloach had allegedly told her he had killed someone the year prior near the location of the shooting that killed Daughtrey.
Deloach was arrested on January 2, this year, and police obtained a DNA sample from him during his intake. On October 2, police confirmed that they matched the DNA provided by Deloach to DNA samples pulled from the baseball cap retrieved from the scene of the shooting two years prior.
Police arrested Deloach on Wednesday and charged him with first-degree murder. He is currently being held on a $750,000 bond.
