At 5:00 in the morning on October 22nd, 2016, armed men broke into a house on Libby Lane in Clayton County, Georgia, and opened fire on the children sleeping inside. They were looking for a 15-year-old boy who was stolen guns from their gang. He was not there. But, 15-year-old Daveon Coates and his 11-year-old sister, Tatiana, were.
Neither of them had any connection to any gang. Neither of them had done anything wrong. They were asleep in their beds. They never woke up. This is the story of how a teenager’s gang ties led a group of armed men to the wrong house, and how two children paid for it with their lives. The Marlborough subdivision in Jonesboro, Georgia, sits inside Clayton County, a community south of Atlanta, that like many suburban counties surrounding major American cities, has seen its share of crime migrate outward from the urban core as families and gang activity both follow population shifts in the region. Libby Lane was a quiet residential street, the kind of block where neighbors knew each other and children played basketball outside. The Coates family had been living in the home for a couple of months, and by all accounts, they were friendly people who kept to themselves and looked out for those around them. That instinct to look out for others was, in a tragic and unforeseen way, one of the circumstances that put Daveon and Tatiana in the crosshairs of people who wanted to kill someone else entirely.
Taneka Brown, the children’s mother, had a generous spirit. When another family she knew fell on hard times, she did what many people in that situation would do. She offered them a place to stay. A woman with five children came to live in the home, and with her came a 15-year-old boy named Deondre Mitchell.
Mitchell was not a member of the Coates family. He was not related to Daveon or Tatiana. He was simply a teenager whose mother had accepted a neighbor’s kindness during a difficult period. He had been staying at the Libby Lane house for a short time before October 22nd. What Taneka Brown did not know and what Davion and Tatiana certainly did not know was what Dondre Mitchell had done and who was now looking for him.
The Rolling 20 Crips are a street gang with roots in Los Angeles that had extended its presence into Atlanta and the surrounding counties over the years. Like many gang factions that established themselves in new cities, the Rolling 20s adapted to their environment while maintaining the codes and internal enforcement mechanisms of the broader [ __ ] gang culture.
One of those mechanisms is the handling of theft from within the organization’s own orbit. Stealing from a gang, particularly stealing weapons, is one of the gravest offenses possible within that world. It is treated not as a property crime, but as an act of disrespect and a challenge to the authority of the organization.
Dondre Mitchell, 15 years old and from Chattanooga, Tennessee, had allegedly stolen firearms from a storage location connected to the Rolling 20 Crips in DeKalb County. The details of how he came to take those weapons and what his exact relationship to the gang was have never been fully spelled out in court records.
But the consequence of what he did was clear and swift. The gang wanted him found and they wanted the guns back. The connection between Mitchell and the house on Libby Lane was established through whatever network of information uh gang members used to track people they’re looking for.
Someone knew or believed they knew that Mitchell was staying at that address. A plan was made. Armed men would travel from DeKalb County to Clayton County, find Mitchell, and handle the situation in whatever way the gang’s leadership saw fit. On the night of October 21st, 2016, running into the early hours of October 22nd, that plan was set in motion.
A group of Rolling 20 Crips members gathered and made their way south to uh Jonesboro. They arrived at Libby Lane while the house was dark and the children inside were asleep. What none of them apparently confirmed before they went in was whether Dondre Mitchell was actually still there.
He was not. Mitchell had already left the house. The house at the time of the invasion was full of children. In addition to Davion and Tatiana, four other children between the ages of 6 and 13 were sleeping in the home. No adult was present. Taneka Brown was out that evening. The children were on their own.
When the men broke in, they moved through the house looking for Mitchell. Clayton County Police Chief Kevin Roberts would later describe what investigators believe happened in those chaotic moments. The gang members were searching for their target in the dark, moving through unfamiliar rooms, and one or more of them encountered sleeping figures they could not clearly identify.
They believed or had convinced themselves that one of those sleeping figures was Daviondra Mitchell. Davion Coates was 15, the same age as the boy they were looking for. Gunfire erupted inside the house. Davion was shot in the room where he was sleeping. Tatiana, just 11 years old, was shot in a separate room.
Detective Michelle Montgomery of the Clayton County Police Department was among the first officers to arrive after a child inside the house made a desperate call to 911. Montgomery later testified in court about what he found. He described discovering Davion lying face down, unresponsive. When he moved to a Tatiana’s room, he found the other children who had been in the house already gathered there.
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One of the young boys was trying to wake his sister. She would not wake up. Montgomery said it was in that moment he realized she was dead. Taneka Brown was at a club in Decatur when her phone rang. It was one of her other children calling from inside the house. She got in her car and drove home.
When she arrived at Libby Lane, police were already there, the scene cordoned off and crawling with investigators. They told her to stay in the yard. Her son and daughter were dead inside. The four other children in the house that night and were physically unharmed. They were between 6 and 13 years old.
They had watched or heard what happened. They were the ones who called the police. They lived with what they had witnessed in ways that no formal investigation would ever fully document. The morning of October 22nd, 2016, Clayton County police officers stood inside a home on Libby Lane confronted by something that visibly shook them.
Channel 2 reporter Steve Guilbault, who had been on scene that morning, later recalled that the then chief and the officer who had become chief at the time heading up criminal investigations were both visibly shaken by what they discovered inside that house. Two children killed in their beds by people who were not even looking for them.
The early hours of the investigation uh were focused on understanding who had done this and why. The gang connection became apparent quickly. What was harder to determine was the specific chain of events. Who drove to Clayton County? Who entered the house? Who fired the shots and how many people were involved? Home invasions involving multiple participants are notoriously difficult to prosecute because establishing individual culpability within a group action requires distinguishing between those who entered, those who stood watch, those who pulled triggers, and those who drove or planned the operation. A critical break came within 36 hours of the murders and it came from more than 130 miles away. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a gang-related drive-by shooting broke out on North Hawthorne Street. During that shooting, a weapon was dropped at the scene. When Tennessee investigators processed that weapon and ran it through the system, it came back linked to the murders on Libby Lane. The gun that had been used to kill children in Georgia had traveled to Tennessee almost immediately after the crime, which told investigators something significant. The same people
who had committed the murders were still moving, still active, and connected to gang operations in Chattanooga. Deondre Mitchell himself, the teenager whose theft of guns had set the entire chain of events in motion, was found in Chattanooga within days of the murders. He was taken into protective custody and questioned.
The investigation was now spanning multiple states and multiple law enforcement jurisdictions. Over the months that followed, Clayton County investigators conducted more than 50 interviews with witnesses, suspects, and people connected to the Rolling 20 Crips network. They pieced together the composition of the group that had traveled to Libby Lane.
A forensic sketch produced by an artist from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation matched the man who would eventually emerge as one of the most disturbing figures in the entire case. Michael DeShawn White was 26 years old. He had a job teaching fifth grade at Tony Elementary School in DeKalb County.
He had started with the district as a paraprofessional in March 2017, months after the murders, and had transitioned into a full classroom teaching role. Every day, he stood in front of a room full of children, somewhere between the ages of 10 and 11, the same age as Tatiana Coates when she was killed.
White was a member of the Rolling 20 Crips. When investigators identified him as a participant in the Libby Lane home invasion, the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office Fugitive Task Force moved to arrest him. They did so at school at Tony Elementary in front of his classroom.
He was handcuffed and walked out of the building in front of staff and whatever students witnessed it. The reaction from law enforcement was unambiguous. Captain Stephon Schindler of Clayton County Police said they were absolutely flabbergasted. He described coming to the realization that a fifth-grade teacher in a public school was teaching children while being part of this.
He said it took their breath away. The double life White had been living was not a case of someone who had committed a crime years ago and rebuilt themselves into a law-abiding citizen. The murders happened in October 2016. He joined DeKalb County Schools in March 2017, five months later, while the investigation was active and the bodies of two children he had allegedly helped kill were barely cold.
He had not walked away from the gang. He had gotten a teaching job. In March 2018, more than a year and a half after the murders, Clayton County District Attorney Tracy Graham Lawson announced the unsealing of a 54-count indictment against 11 individuals connected to the Rolling 20 Crips. Nine of the 11 were charged directly with the murders of Daveion and Tatiana Coates.
The charges against the various defendants included malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, first-degree cruelty to children, third-degree cruelty to children, home invasion, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, violation of the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, and violation of the RICO Act.
The names on the indictment were Vernon Beeman, Christopher Spencer, Sterling Pate, Melvin Crockett, Devon Dunson, Sherman Thomas, Michael White, Jayman Bynum, Jamar Mitchell, Deondre Mitchell, and Rashad Character. Chief Roberts addressed the community directly at the press conference. He said the indictment served as notice to criminals, and more specifically to gang members who committed crimes in Clayton County, that they would be apprehended and prosecuted to the greatest extent. He also said something that went to the heart of the tragedy. The Coach’s children were visiting with another family and had no way of knowing the harm coming their way. That sentence carries an enormous amount of weight. These were not children who had stumbled into gang territory or made choices that placed them in danger. They were in their own home, in their own beds, asleep. The harm came to them. They had no warning, no chance to run, no understanding of why men with guns were walking through their house. The first of the indicted defendants to
face trial was Jayman Bynum, also known as Mondo, 28 years old at the time of proceedings. Bynum’s trial in May 2019 became the moment where the full picture of what happened on Libby Lane was laid out publicly for the first time. Prosecutors presented evidence of Bynum’s role in the home invasion, his presence inside the house, and his handling of one of the murder weapons.
In a remarkable turn, Bynum took the stand in his own defense and admitted that he had traveled to Libby Lane with co-defendants Devon Dunson and another man, that he had entered the house carrying one of the murder weapons, and that inside Michael White had taken the gun from his hands and gone toward Davion’s bedroom.
He testified White handed the gun back to him afterward. Whatever Bynum was attempting to establish with that testimony, the jury was not persuaded that it reduced his culpability. They deliberated for just 20 minutes. Bynum was found guilty on all 43 counts against him, including two counts of malice murder, multiple counts of felony murder, aggravated assault, cruelty to children, home invasion, and gang activity violations.
The speed of the deliberation was its own statement. 20 minutes to evaluate 43 counts across a multi-day trial. The jury did not find this case complicated. Tanager Brown, the mother of the murdered children, was in the courtroom when Bynum was brought in to face judgment. She had not been present for much of the trial, but on certain days, she sat in that courtroom and looked at the men who had taken her children.
The moment when a family member of a murder victim is brought face to face with the convicted killer inside a courtroom is one of the most specific and strange rituals of the legal system, a forced proximity between grief and the source of it within a formal institutional setting. Judge Aaron Mason sentenced Bynum to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, one for each child he had killed, plus an additional 22 years.
He would never leave prison. Clayton County District Attorney Lawson described the Coats case as one of the saddest she had ever prosecuted. “Shooting children who are asleep in their beds,” she said, “was messed up.” She added that those children had nothing to do with anything. While Bynum’s trial was the first, the case that would ultimately carry the most weight in the public consciousness was the one against Michael White, the teacher, the man who had gone from allegedly killing children on a Saturday morning to standing in front of a classroom of children by the following spring. White’s case moved through the legal system over a considerably longer timeline. Between the other co-defendants pleading guilty or awaiting trial and the complexity of building the specific evidentiary case against White, his trial did not take place until 2026, nearly a decade after the murders. The wait for the Coats family and for the community that had followed the case since that October morning in 2016 was long, but the outcome was definitive. In February 2026, a jury convicted Michael White on all 44 counts against him.
Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney La Karian Blount told reporters that at the time of the murders, White had been a member of the Rolling 20 Crips who had entered the Coats’ home armed with a shotgun looking for Davion while knowing or believing he was searching for Dondre Mitchell. When the actual target was not found, the shooting happened anyway.
In March 2026, Judge Aaron Mason, the same judge who had sentenced Baynham years earlier, sentenced White to two life sentences without the possibility of parole plus 20 additional years for home invasion and a fine of $202,020 to him he totaled. The specific figure of the fine was not accidental.
Judge Mason stated that it was chosen in recognition of White’s affiliation with the Rolling 20 Crips and that gang’s well-documented obsession with the number 20. It was a judge’s way of embedding the gang’s own identity into the financial penalty they had forced upon him. White was led out of the courtroom.
The man who had been teaching fifth graders at Tony Elementary while being a murder suspect will spend the rest of his life in a Georgia prison. Throughout the legal proceedings, the name Dondre Mitchell occupied a complicated position. He was the reason the gang came to Libby Lane.
He was the theft that had set the retaliation in motion. He was the 15-year-old boy who had taken guns from the Rolling 20 Crips and whose presence in the Coats’ household, temporary and innocent in the eyes of Taneka Brown, had marked that house as a target. Mitchell faced murder charges of his own. Under Georgia law, participants in a criminal conspiracy can be held criminally responsible for deaths that result from that conspiracy even if they were not physically present when the killing occurred.
The argument that Mitchell’s theft created the chain of events that ended in the deaths of Davion and Tatiana was one that prosecutors pursued through the indictment. The moral weight of Mitchell’s role is something the legal system was forced to grapple with carefully. He was 15 years old. He had stolen guns, which is itself a serious crime and one that reflected his own entanglement with gang culture.
But he did not invite men into a house to shoot children. He did not know or could not have known that the people looking for him would go to that specific address and open fire on children in their beds. The chain of causation ran from his act to the decisions of adult gang members who chose to respond with lethal force at night inside a residential home without confirming who was actually there.
Georgia’s course sorted through that complexity within the broader framework of the gang conspiracy charges. Mitchell’s case, along with those of the remaining co-defendants who had not yet gone to trial by the time of White’s 2026 conviction, moved through the system according to his own timeline.
The murders of Davion and Tatiana Coats were not a complicated case in terms of what happened. Armed men went to a house looking for someone who was not there and shot two children who were. The facts were not in serious dispute. What the case revealed through the nine plus years it took to fully prosecute all of the defendants was a set of truths about how gang violence operates, how it reaches into communities that have no involvement in gang activity, and how deeply embedded that world can be even in people whose surface lives appear to have nothing to do with it. Michael White teaches fifth grade. That sentence, stripped of context, is ordinary. Combined with what came before and after it, it is one of the most disturbing details in the entire case. The idea that a man could participate in the murder of an 11-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy in the early hours of a Saturday morning, and then 5 months later began building a career in a school full of children that age, speaks to a level of compartmentalization and disregard that investigators said
genuinely took their breath away. Gang culture in Atlanta, as in many American cities, is not confined to a visible underworld that operates entirely separately from mainstream life. Members hold jobs, live in neighborhoods, and interact daily with people who have no idea what they do or who they are within the gang’s hierarchy.
The Rolling 20 Crips had moved from Los Angeles to Georgia and established a presence across multiple counties. Their members worked in schools and drove to neighboring counties to execute gang business in the middle of the night. The Coats family was not part of that world. Taneisha Brown had taken in another family as an act of kindness.
That kindness connected her household to a teenager with gang ties, and that connection alone was enough for armed men to decide that her address was the right place to look for their target. Davion and Tatyana Coats were buried in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the family also had roots.
Their funerals were held in October 2016 in the same city where De’Andre Mitchell was later found, and where the murder weapon would turn up in a drive-by shooting days after the killings. The proximity of all of these threats to a city more than 100 miles from Clayton County is one of the details that illustrates how interconnected these gang networks have become across state lines.
The Coats family did not attend the 2018 press conference where the indictment was announced. Chief Roberts relayed that they had received some small piece of solace from the progress of the case. Small piece. That was the phrase. After 2 years of waiting, of not knowing whether anyone would be held accountable, a 54-count indictment against 11 people produced a small piece of solace.
The mathematics of grief do not convert easily into the language of legal proceedings. The four children who were in that house and survived, the ones who were between 6 and 13 years old, who heard the gunshots and gathered in Tatyana’s room and tried to wake her up, who made the call to 911 that brought the police to Libby Lane, were never prominently named in the coverage of the case.
They moved through the subsequent years as unnamed witnesses to something no child should witness, carrying what they saw in ways that no court record will ever fully capture. By the time Michael White was convicted in February 2026 and sentenced in March 2026, nearly 10 years had passed since Davion and Tatyana were killed.
The case had outlasted the tenure of two district attorneys. It had spanned multiple trials, dozens of guilty pleas, and a legal process that stretched from Georgia to Tennessee, and drew on investigators from multiple agencies across both states. What remained at the end of it was a set of sentences.
Two life terms for Jayman Bynum, two life terms for Michael White. Multiple co-defendants convicted or having pleaded guilty to charges that carried decades of prison time. The Rolling 20 Crips members who traveled to Libby Lane on October 22nd, 2016, would not be returning to any community. The organization’s presence in DeKalb and Clayton County had been significantly disrupted by one of the most comprehensive prosecutions in the region’s recent history.
None of that restores what was taken on that October morning. Daveon Coats was 15. He was the oldest child in the house that night. A teenager on the ordinary edge of becoming a young man, with whatever future was in front of him. Tatyana was 11. She was a child. One of the young boys in the house was trying to wake her when Detective Montgomery arrived. She would not wake up.
The gang that sent men to that house looking for a stolen gun got the wrong person. They did not get any person at all in the sense that they were looking for. What they got was two children who had nothing to do with their business, their grievances, or their world. Daveon and Tatyana Coats did not know the harm that was coming their way.
No one told them. No one warned them. They went to sleep in their house and the harm came anyway. That is what gang violence looks like when it reaches its furthest and most senseless point. Not a targeted killing, not a retaliation that even hit its intended mark, but two children in their beds who had the wrong person sleeping under the same roof, whose mother had been kind to the wrong family, who had no idea that any of this existed until the moment it ended their lives.
