Jago Times "English Edition" Best Online Newspaper
Police have arrested two murder suspects thee months after a Dallas man was shot while clinging to the side of a moving pickup in Dolphin Heights.
Jesus Angel Rodriguez, 35, and Eduardo Gaspar, 18, face murder charges in the slaying of 22-year-old Traveon Deonte Lafayette Miller, according to police documents.
On Aug. 25, Miller confronted one of the suspects at a Texaco gas station at Dolphin Road and Haskell Avenue, apparently accusing him of stealing his car two weeks earlier from the same gas station before stripping it and abandoning it.
The men parted ways, with the victim walking to his Ford Mustang “with a purpose” and the suspects fleeing the gas station in a Chevy lowrider pickup that also had been stolen, police documents show.
The lowrider returned 10 minutes later, and the driver flashed the pickup’s high beams at the Mustang. Failing to provoke Miller, the pickup driver rear-ended the Mustang, according to Rodriguez’s arrest-warrant affidavit.
The footage also showed a muzzle flash from inside the pickup, near where Miller was found shot in the 4800 block of Dolphin Road about 4:15 a.m. The pickup fled west on Haskell Avenue and was later found abandoned and burning in the 3600 block of Ledbetter Drive.
An anonymous tipster identified Rodriguez as the shooter and said Gaspar was also in the pickup at the time. A witness who told police that Rodriguez admitted shooting Miller and that the suspects had taken the Mustang from the victim two weeks before the shooting.
Both suspects remain in the Dallas County Jail, with Rodriguez’s bail set at $180,000 and Gaspar’s at $270,500. Gaspar also faces aggravated assault charges in an October 2018 shooting.