The First 48: Friend in Need & Killer of a Kind Heart (S23, E16)
He was found on the floor inside a sleeping bag. Three full days had passed since anyone had heard from him. His sister had been calling and calling, but the phone just rang and rang until it went silent. When officers finally forced the door open, there he was—still wrapped in that bag, still in the position he had fallen asleep in, never to wake up again.
Denzel Romaine was thirty years old. He was trying to turn his life around. He had been living at the Intown Suites in Gwinnett County, Georgia, with help from his mother, saving money, staying out of trouble, shooting hoops at the local park. He had survived harder years. He had kept smiling through all of them. But on a night when he had simply invited friends over to play cards, someone decided that his kindness would be the last thing he ever gave.
The suspects were people he called his friends.
Detective Corporal Tyler Daniel arrived at the hotel room and assessed the scene immediately. Denzel had been shot through his sleeping bag—once in the abdomen, once in the pelvis, once in the back. On top of the bag, two unfired 9-millimeter rounds had been left behind like a signature. Nearby, three shell casings. Whoever had done this had stood over him while he slept and pulled the trigger three times.
“I got a call this morning in reference to a homicide at this Intown Suites,” Daniel said at the scene. “He hasn’t been heard from in almost seventy-two hours, so the suspect has a huge head start on us.”
The first witness was a man who lived at the hotel. He told detectives that he had played cards in Denzel’s room three nights ago. Two other men were also there: a man named Dino and a man named Rico. Dino was someone Denzel would sometimes let stay in his room—a pattern Denzel had, always sharing what little he had. Rico lived on the first floor of the hotel with his family.
The witness said he and Rico had left Denzel’s room around 11:00 p.m. to go shoot dice at another location. Dino had stayed behind. Now, Dino had disappeared. He wasn’t answering his phone. He wasn’t showing up at the hotel. He had simply vanished into the city.
“Dino’s basically ghosted everybody,” Daniel said. “Not showing up, not answering phone calls, so it’s just looking suspicious.”
Then Daniel interviewed Dino himself. Dino was nervous but cooperative. He told detectives that he had fallen asleep in Denzel’s room that night. In the early morning, around 6:30 a.m., he was awakened by the sound of the door opening. He saw Rico standing in the doorway. Then Rico lifted a gun and fired. Three shots. Denzel never moved. He never had a chance.
Dino’s girlfriend confirmed the story. She said she saw Rico running down the hallway from Denzel’s room, a weapon still in his hand. She watched him disappear into the first room past the wheelchair ramp—Rico’s room. She remembered the time because she had glanced at her phone right after. It was 6:50 a.m.
When Daniel pulled the hotel’s surveillance footage, the camera told the rest of the story. At 6:45 a.m., a figure was seen standing on the third floor, milling around. Then he walked straight down the hallway toward Denzel’s apartment. At 6:50 a.m., the same figure came running back down the stairs. The camera caught the glint of a weapon in his hand.
“That’s Rico’s room,” Daniel said, pointing at the screen. “I’ve got more than enough in my opinion to show that it is Rico.”
But when detectives went to arrest him, the room was empty. Rico and his family had been evicted because of the search warrant. They had scattered into the city with nowhere official to call home anymore. The team searched the room anyway and found the evidence they needed: a brown hoodie, a black jacket, black pants, and black shoes—all matching the security footage from the motel. In a backpack, they found twenty 9-millimeter rounds, identical to the ones found at the crime scene. The weapon was gone, but the ammunition and the clothes painted a picture that could not be ignored.
Days passed. Daniel put out a BOLO. He reached out to family members. He asked for someone—anyone—to convince Rico to come in and tell his side of the story. But no one would speak. The family closed ranks.
Then, two days after the search, a call came. Rico’s family had contacted the police chief directly. They wanted to turn him in. They wanted to do it safely, with no confrontation, no violence—just surrender.
“He’s in custody,” Daniel confirmed. “His family brought him in.”
Tariq Strickland—Rico—was twenty-three years old. He had a previous misdemeanor conviction for criminal trespass. Nothing in his record suggested he was capable of standing over a sleeping man and firing three rounds into him. But the evidence said otherwise. The surveillance footage. The clothes. The ammunition. Dino’s girlfriend’s testimony. It was all there, waiting for him.
When Daniel sat down across from him in the interrogation room, he asked the question that had haunted the investigation from the beginning. “Why did you shoot Denzel when he was sleeping in his sleeping bag? What did Denzel do to make you do that?”
Rico laughed.
“I don’t understand why you keep thinking this is funny,” Daniel said. “I would not laugh if I was getting charged with murder.”
But Rico did not stop. He did not explain. He did not confess. He sat there with a smirk on his face, refusing to give Denzel’s family the one thing they deserved: a reason. The detectives pressed him. They showed him the footage. They laid out the evidence piece by piece. “Cameras don’t lie, man,” Daniel told him. “You literally ran right underneath a camera. That search warrant I did on your apartment, I found the exact clothes you were wearing. Shoes, pants, jacket, hoodie. Nine-millimeter ammunition that matches the ones we found in the room.”
Rico kept laughing.
“This is your one opportunity to give me your side of the story,” Daniel said. “I want the truth. That’s the only way.”
Rico said nothing.
At his graveside ten months later, Denzel’s family gathered in the rain. They spoke about his mental illness, how he always kept a smile on his face no matter how hard things got. How he was trying to be independent, which was why he was at the extended stay hotel in the first place. How the little that he had, he shared with everybody—his room, his food, his clothes. They took his stuff sometimes, but as long as he had people around him, it was all right with him.
“He was struggling with a mental illness,” his mother said. “You couldn’t tell that he was going through anything. No matter how serious the situation, he always kept a smile on his face.”
His sister added, “The little that he had, he shared it. He shared it with everybody. He shared his room, he shared his food, he shared his clothes. They took his stuff sometimes, but as long as he had people around him, it was all right with him.”
She paused, her voice breaking. “This is what really bothers me the most—all that he did for everybody, he didn’t deserve what they did to him. They didn’t just hurt Denzel. They hurt everybody that loved Denzel.”
Meanwhile, three hundred fifty miles away in Mobile, Alabama, another case was unfolding. A different detective, a different city, a different kind of tragedy. A young woman named Jasmine Pettway, twenty-four years old, had been shot once in the chest while trying to protect her roommate. She had been born and raised in Mobile. She loved dance and basketball. She wanted to become a nurse. She was the kind of person who lit up a room just by walking into it.
Her roommate told detectives that her boyfriend, Darrin Sanders Jr., twenty-three years old, had been fighting with her that night. Jasmine tried to intervene. She was only trying to help. And Darrin shot her for it.
Detective Rory Graves had encountered Sanders before. A year earlier, Graves had been in the Crime Detail Unit when they stopped Sanders for a traffic violation. One of Graves’s partners asked Sanders to step out of the vehicle. Instead, Sanders sped off. A high-speed chase ensued, ending at an apartment complex where Sanders ran on foot before being taken into custody. He caught six charges that day, on top of the warrants he already had.
“He obviously just doesn’t care,” Graves said. “He’s just that type of guy. He’s a runner for sure, man.”
Now Sanders was running again. Detectives searched every address they had for him. They knocked on doors, talked to relatives, put out BOLOs. Nothing. He had gone underground, and he was good at staying hidden.
Eleven days after Jasmine’s murder, an anonymous tip came in. Someone sent Graves a batch of photos from a soon-to-be-famous rapper’s Facebook page. There, in the middle of a pool party in Atlanta, was Darrin Sanders. He was smiling, laughing, posing for the camera. He knew he was wanted for murder, and he was out partying.
“It was in Atlanta,” Graves said, staring at the photos. “He knows he’s wanted for murder, and he’s out here partying. That just clearly shows that he doesn’t care about this incident. My victim doesn’t get to do that. My victim no longer gets to live her life. So obviously, I want to bring justice to her family.”
The U.S. Marshals were brought in. They worked to pinpoint Sanders’s location, but he kept moving, kept hiding, kept slipping through their fingers. Another week passed with no sign of him. Then, without warning, he walked into the Mobile County Metro Jail and turned himself in.
“I appreciate it,” Graves said when he got the call. “It looks like Darrin Sanders just turned himself in. We called and asked if we can get an interview set up, but he’s not gonna talk to us, unfortunately. I really wish we would’ve gotten an interview with Darrin Sanders and just asked him why. I would love to know what was going through Darrin’s head at the time. Was it in the moment? Was it out of emotions that cost Jasmine Pettway her life? The family deserves answers.”
But the answers never came. Sanders refused to speak. He lawyered up and went silent, leaving behind a family that would spend the rest of their lives wondering why a man they had never met decided that their daughter’s life was worth less than his anger.
Back in Georgia, Tariq Strickland faced the consequences of his choices. He was charged with aggravated assault and felony murder. The evidence was overwhelming. The surveillance footage. The matching clothes. The ammunition. The eyewitness testimony. It all pointed in one direction.
But when Daniel asked him one last time—”Why did you do it?”—Rico just laughed.
He thought it was funny. A man was dead. A family was destroyed. A kind heart had been extinguished in a hotel room by someone he had welcomed in, fed, housed, called a friend. And the killer sat in an interrogation room, chuckling at the questions.
“I feel like there’s still a lot out there that’s unanswered,” Daniel said after the interview. “I just want to know why. I want to be able to tell Denzel’s mom that this is why your kid was murdered. But Tariq’s not willing to tell us why. He may very well remember Denzel’s homicide, but I think he’s trying to tell himself that it was all a dream.”
At the graveside, Denzel’s family released balloons into the gray sky. The rain had stopped, but the ground was still wet, and the air smelled like soil and flowers. His mother stood at the headstone, her hand resting on the cold marble.
“Long live my baby,” she whispered.
The balloons rose higher and higher, disappearing into the clouds one by one. Somewhere up there, Denzel was finally at peace. But down here, on the wet grass of a graveyard in Georgia, his family was left with the only thing Rico had given them: silence.
The clock had run out on the first forty-eight hours long ago. But for those who loved Jasmine and Denzel, the clock would never stop ticking. It would mark every hour of every day without them. It would count every missed birthday, every graduation they never attended, every phone call that would never come. And it would keep asking the same question, over and over, without ever receiving an answer.
Why?
