‘The most gross thing I’ve ever seen’: Gang member laughs at victims families during sentencing for deadly apartment ambush

An Ohio gang member who was on parole for a robbery conviction when he ambushed three men outside an apartment complex, killing two and wounding a third, has learned his fate.

Datwain Crudup, 29, was sentenced on Thursday to life in prison with parole possible after 46 years for his role in the murders of Kevin Williams and Nickolas Cowans and the attempted murder of a third man, the Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney announced in a press release.

He was convicted last month of four counts of murder, a count of attempted murder, felonious assault, and firearms violations.

At the hearing, the defendant looked back in court and laughed at the victims’ family members, as reported by Bethany Bruner, a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch.

“The fact that he could laugh at these women … is the most gross thing I’ve ever seen. Zero has been learned from this,” Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Leigh Bayer said. “To have the person who is responsible for their deaths laugh in their (families’) faces during their sentencing is just unfathomable.”

Datwain Crudup, a documented gang member, had to be moved to a different table in the courtroom during his sentencing because he kept turning around, smirking at the families of the two men he shot and killed in April 2021 and laughing. https://t.co/zzDceMBAJp

— Bethany Bruner (@bethany_bruner) September 26, 2024

Cowans’ grandfather, Bruce McCaskill, an ordained minister, laid into the defendant.

“To murder people in broad daylight, it shows an evilness that we shouldn’t have to live with, that we shouldn’t have to be around,” McCaskill said. “You have put my soul at stake because there’s no forgiveness. It hurts for me to have to set aside everything I have preached and I have taught because I can’t get this hatefulness out of my heart.”

Williams’ sister, Ebony Williams, said her family will never be the same. The victim wounded in the shooting was Williams’ brother. Crudup is a father himself, she said, the newspaper reported.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t want nobody to take yours,” she said. “And you took yourself from your own.”

The defendant maintained his innocence, saying, “I didn’t do what they’re saying I did. I did nothing wrong.”

The bloodshed happened on April 3, 2021, as the victims were gathered outside an apartment complex in Columbus, authorities said. Crudup and an unidentified co-conspirator ambushed the victims, prosecutors said.

Citing charging documents, local ABC and Fox affiliate WSYX reported that a gunman got out of the passenger side of a gold-colored Pontiac G6 and ambushed the victims from behind.

Crudup, who was on parole at the time for a 2012 case involving burglary and robbery, fled to California shortly after the shooting. He was arrested more than eight months later, on Dec. 21, 2021.

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