Authorities have arrested a suspect who had been on the run since January after being charged in a Minneapolis murder-for-hire plot that left resulting in the death of a mother and real estate agent, a department spokesman confirmed on Thursday.
Five months after Monique Baugh was killed, authorities arrested Berry Davis, who had been a fugitive for nearly five months after court records show he slipped out of a St. Louis Park hotel as police were closing in last January. A police spokesman said that Davis was arrested in Illinois, but the circumstances of the arrest weren’t immediately known.
He and another alleged co-conspirator, Cedric Berry, were previously indicted on first-degree murder charges for their role in Baugh’s kidnapping and killing on New Year’s Eve.
Online records for the Cook County (Ill.) jail show that a man under the name Berry Davis was booked on May 1 and is being held without bond.
Baugh’s slaying gained widespread publicity for its brutality and numerous twists and turns outlined in court filings.
At one point, the FBI got involved in the investigation, loaning a member of its Cellular Analysis and Survey Team to help investigators sift through cellphone records for clues.
Prosecutors allege that Baugh was kidnapped from a home in Maple Grove and dragged into a waiting UHaul truck, possibly tortured, and her body was later dumped into a north Minneapolis alley.
Search warrant affidavits and criminal complaints filed in the case paint a complicated plot revolving around a dispute over a record deal between Baugh’s boyfriend and a fellow rapper. Police have said that at least eight people, in varying roles, were involved, coordinating their actions by cellphone and walkie talkie.
The suspected triggerman is in federal custody on an unrelated charge, but so far no public charges have been filed against him in the Baugh case.
Police believe that Baugh’s boyfriend, Jon Mitchell-Momoh, was the intended victim of the alleged plot. Less than an hour before Baugh’s death, a masked gunman, believed to be Berry, walked into the couple’s North Side home and shot Mitchell-Momoh, while the couple’s young children were nearby, court records show.
Mitchell-Momoh, who survived the shooting, told detectives he believed that he was targeted either because he had been flaunting “a lot of money” on his social media accounts or that people suspected him of cooperating with police, according to court filings. Investigators learned that Mitchell-Momoh had a falling out with a former friend over a record deal signing and that man may have ordered the hit on Mitchell-Momoh’s life, the warrant said.
The former friend-turned-rival, a rapper signed to a recording label in Chicago who is only identified by his initials in court filings, has not been publicly charged.
His status was not known Thursday.
Prosecutors previously charged Shante Davis, of Minneapolis, with being an accomplice after the fact. Cellphone records and video surveillance placed Davis — the wife of Cedric Berry, and sister of Berry “Big” Davis — with the two suspects when they picked up a rental truck the day before Baugh’s slaying.
Court records show that all three had been under court-authorized surveillance by members of a local drug task force in the weeks before the killing.
Another alleged player in the plot is Elsa Segura, a former county probation officer, who police believe helped lure Baugh to a phony home showing in Maple Grove, where she was kidnapped.
Segura remains in jail on $1 million bail, while Shante Davis has been transferred to another facility, jail records show. Cedric Berry is being held in lieu of $2 million bail, with his next court appearance set for Aug. 31. He has pleaded not guilty.