A neighbor thought she heard fireworks inside an apartment late Monday. Turns out the loud bangs were gunshots that killed her neighbor and her neighbor’s daughter.
Witnesses heard 27-year-old Devanta Lashawn Roberts arguing with his 22-year-old girlfriend, Victoria Moore, inside the couple’s apartment in Indianapolis, Indiana before he allegedly shot Moore and her 3-year-old daughter, Datoria Kaprice Roberts, according to Lafayette police and Tippecanoe County Coroner Carrie Costello.
“But they always argued,” the neighbor said, recalling how she heard Roberts and Moore arguing Monday night about an hour before the killing. “They always fought. It’s like a couple thing.”
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“But who don’t?” she rhetorically asked about couples’ disagreements.
The neighbor called her child inside about 20 or 30 minutes before the killing. Her child had been playing with Datoria.
Sadly, not this night.
Roberts shot Moore and Datoria about 11:30 p.m. Monday inside the apartment on Lafayette’s southwest side, police said. Roberts then fled the scene, police said.
One neighbor said the killings were in the downstairs portion of the apartment.
Other neighbors, Lindsey Lemen and Cashmere Walker, heard sirens and came outside to see what was the cause of the commotion.
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They saw police running in and out of Moore and Roberts’ apartment, and ambulances arriving and leaving. They said they overheard Datroia’s grandmother saying that the baby was still alive, but Moore was dead.
Roberts later was arrested at 5th and Main streets during a traffic stop, according to police.
Paramedics rushed Moore to a Lafayette hospital, where she died, and Datoria was taken to a Marion County hospital, where she also died, Costello said.
Autopsies were scheduled for Wednesday in Tippecanoe County, she said.
By late Tuesday morning, crime-scene tape only roped off Moore and Roberts’ apartment, which they called home for only a brief time.
“They just moved in,” one of the neighbors said. “They just rented probably two, three, four months, tops. She was sweet. She didn’t bother no body.”
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