This much seemed clear: A man wearing a black face mask fired 21 gunshots that left his target dead in the broad daylight of a neighborhood parking lot.
What detectives couldn’t figure out was what had brought the shooter there.
Then they arrested a suspect, according to court records, searched his phone and found text messages he allegedly wrote about a new vocation. “This hit man s— has been picking up,” Douglas Lacey, 24, allegedly wrote in a group chat.
The words are now at the heart of a twisting, 18-month-long case unfolding in Montgomery County, Maryland. “Basically, you have a murder-for-hire here,” prosecutor John Lalos said in court this month.
He pointed to other passages found in Lacey’s phone that authorities believe evoked hit man work. “Tell me all the info on the target you got,” an iPhone note read, “and I’ll move up your slot.” The same note, spelled out in court records, also described a pistol modified to fire like a machine gun and stated, “My demon got excited.”
Lacey’s attorney, Mark Anderson, said his client maintains his innocence and there is no proof that whatever Lacey may have written amounts to anything more than dark humor or meaningless bluster. “It could mean anything,” Anderson said.
He added that none of those writings link Lacey to a financial arrangement with the person authorities have accused of hiring him, Bekine Ayele, 23. An attorney who represented Ayele in court recently, Luke Swinney, declined to comment.
In court hearings and filings thus far, neither Lacey nor Ayele have yet to advance their side of the case. And no evidence has been presented in court that detectives know an asking price or even if money changed hands. They instead have built their cases through a web of cell tower data, GPS readings, license plate scanners, FaceTime screen shares and surveillance video. Both men are charged with first-degree murder.
Ahead of Lacey’s trial, which is set for next year, Anderson is seeking dismissal of the cell tower and GPS evidence. The actions of Montgomery County investigators, he asserted in recent court filings, hark back 250 years to British soldiers rummaging through Colonial homes in a way that “helped spark the revolution itself.”
In this modern-day case, detectives obtained warrants to compel cellphone carriers to turn over location data for all phones and electronic devices that were near the homicide around the time it occurred. That broad sweep, Anderson argued, invaded the privacy expectations of an untold number of people with zero connection to what happened.
A circuit court judge has yet to rule on the issue but told Anderson in court recently the warrants appeared valid. “You’re going to have to do a lot of arguing to get me off that point,” Judge J. Bradford McCullough said.
‘Jonah was gone’
It was a crisp Saturday morning in March 2025 when Jonah Mutua, 23, walked from his townhouse into the parking lot. He and his older brother, a physician, were about to help their parents move furniture into a rented U-Haul, according to police and neighborhood residents.
A masked gunman jumped from his car, police say, and fired two bursts of automatic gunfire. Mutua stumbled and tried to run, according to residents, and called for his dad before collapsing on the pavement.
Residents of the close-knit street — Fairdale Terrace in Montgomery’s Fairland area — heard the blasts from inside their homes. One, Rose Howe, said her EMT-trained son rushed outside. “He tried to perform CPR,” Howe said. “But Jonah was gone.”
As police converged, others described the gunman speeding away in a gray or blue Tesla with no license plates. Investigators took a standard first step: looking through the victim’s cellphone for communications portending trouble with someone. Nothing.
Farther from the scene, detectives found residential doorbell video showing a similar car pass by before and after the shooting. Those images, investigators asserted in court filings, offered clear details: chrome trim around tinted side windows and dark wheel rims with 10 spokes each.
It matched the description of a car used in a different shooting seven months earlier outside a swimming pool. But detectives still had no tag numbers or any idea who might have been inside.
Detective Charles Horwitz turned his attention to the investigative tactics — known as “tower dumps” and “area searches” — now being challenged by Lacey’s attorney. He obtained a search warrant and sent it to AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. The companies responded with a raft of data on electronic devices that were near the fatal shooting of Mutua — from 45 minutes before to 15 minutes after.
Exactly how many devices that were captured is unclear. Anderson said it was thousands.
Prosecutors said detectives set boundaries as small as practical with their goal being to use phone numbers and device markers as leads to possible suspects. Looking through the data — and comparing it with the same kind of data obtained earlier by a detective probing the shooting outside the swimming pool — police became convinced the same GPS tracking device had traveled through both crime scenes.
Horwitz tracked down the company that managed the data emitting from the GPS device and spoke with an employee. “We’re showing that on a 2020 Tesla Model 3,” the man said, according to Horwitz’s testimony at a recent hearing. The employee then provided the car’s Vehicle Identification Number and told Horwitz that he could give him records of the tracker’s exact movements after the detective sent a subpoena.
‘Got a lot to learn’
One week later — after detectives sifted through those and other records — a SWAT team arrested Lacey at his home in Prince George’s County. Under his bed, authorities allege, investigators found a 9mm handgun. Outside in a parked gray Tesla, they found a second handgun and a rifle, according to court filings.
There is reason to believe Lacey didn’t know there was a GPS tracker attached to his car. As described in court records, a previous owner of the Tesla had the tracker installed under a three-year service plan that was never canceled.
When questioned by investigators, they assert, Lacey confirmed he was the Tesla’s sole driver. But when Horwitz told him about the tracker, Lacey, who listed gymnastic coach as his most recent job after his arrest, stopped talking and asked for a lawyer, according to court records.
Even with all the data and records they’d collected, investigators still could make no connection between Lacey and the victim. But Lacey’s arrest had produced a new clue: his cellphone.
And that was bad news, according to longtime defense attorneys not involved in the case, for the person who police now say ordered the killing. “If you hire someone to do this,” said one of them, David Moyse, “you’re only as good as the person you hire.”
The going rate in alleged hit man cases he has encountered, Moyse said, has struck him as surprisingly modest — $5,000 or less. “Maybe it’s just that the expensive guys never get caught,” he said.
Inside Lacey’s phone, investigators say they found incoming texts asking if he’d reached Hollywood hit man status. “Naw not yet,” Lacey allegedly wrote back. “Got a lot to learn.”
Among screenshots saved on the phone, according to court records, investigators found images of a FaceTime chat 11 days before the murder. A person using “Keem’s iPhone” had shared a photograph of the victim, Mutua, and shared a map of Mutua’s neighborhood with a pin at his townhouse, according to investigators.
In Lacey’s contacts, investigators scrolled to “Keem” and learned the corresponding phone number, according to their allegations filed in court. They say they linked that number to Keem’s real name: Bekine Ayele, who lived in nearby Burtonsville. Given what he had shared with Lacey over FaceTime, the investigators assert, they now suspected he was the person who had hired him to kill Mutua.
They pieced together past connections between Mutua and Ayele, according to court filings. The two, along with two others, had been involved in a 2022 drug-related robbery in Baltimore County, an incident that resulted in no jail time for any of them. Also of great interest to detectives: Mutua appeared to still owe Ayele $2,200, they said.
Another longtime Maryland defense attorney, William Brennan, said prosecutors in hit man cases differ on which party bears more responsibility. Some say the employee, reasoning that he was the last person who could have stopped the crime. Others say that person is merely a “mechanism” for the more culpable employer who set the killing in motion, Brennan said.
“I’ve seen it go both ways,” Brennan said.
Recognition, affection and sorrow
Among residents of Fairdale Terrace, where Mutua grew up and was gunned down, recognition of the wrong turns he took in recent years is outweighed by affection and sorrow.
“A great kid from an incredible family,” said Kevin Loudermill, a longtime resident in one of 18 townhouses sharing the same parking lot.
Speaking from his front step next to Howe, the neighbors recalled how often they saw Mutua sitting outside his door at night waiting for his mom to come home from nursing shifts so he could walk her in. For years, Mutua played drums at church services led by his dad, said Loudermill, who owns a moving company and is known as “Coach” on Fairdale Terrace for the time he spent teaching basketball and football to neighborhood kids.
More recently, Mutua had gotten a delivery job and spoke of wanting to pursue his commercial driver’s license, according to Loudermill, who asked him about moving from Maryland to put distance between himself and the people with whom he’d recently associated. “That kind of trouble doesn’t just go away,” Loudermill remembers telling him.
“Coach I’m going to be okay,” the young man responded.
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