Jury sends former college football player to prison for life for murdering a Fort Worth father

It took jurors about three hours on Thursday to convict a former Abilene college football player of murder and later that day, the jury sentenced him to life in prison.

Prosecutors said that Dontrell Dock and three other men conspired to rob a Fort Worth father of three of his marijuana stash.

During the Jan. 11, 2017 robbery, Chris-Dion Russell, 29, was shot to death.

Dock, 21, of Conroe, and co-defendant, Broderick Earl Ross, 20, were each charged with capital murder in connection with the slaying. Ross’ trial is pending.

The punishment phase of the trial began Thursday afternoon.

Dock faced a maximum life prison sentence for the murder charge. If the jury had convicted Dock of capital murder, he would have automatically spent life in prison with no possibility for parole.

Dock told police that he was the lookout and a man a Tarrant County grand jury declined to indict, Ryan McBeth, 20, of Fort Worth, was the actual shooter.

All three men, Dock, Ross and McBeth, played football for McMurry University, a small Methodist school in Abilene. A fourth suspect, known to police only as “Little Haiti,” has not been arrested, according to authorities.

Detectives linked the suspects to the case after watching surveillance video from the night of the shooting and seeing a Chrysler 300 leave Russell’s apartment. The car was traced to Ross’ brother, who told police that Ross used the car on the night of the shooting, according to the affidavits.

Text messages retrieved by investigators showed that the suspects talked about the robbery prior to the night of Russell’s death, evidence produced at trial showed.

“They were going to go hit that lick,” said defense attorney Tim Moore, referring to a robbery.

But McBeth was the mastermind and was probably the shooter, Moore argued. Dock was not the shooter, Moore said.

“Their plan was to go in there, get the money, get the dope and go back to Abilene,” Moore said. “The text messages clearly show a conspiracy to commit an aggravated robbery. No calls about killing anyone, no calls about shooting anyone.”

Prosecutor Marcus Hanna disagreed with Moore’s assessment.

Hanna argued that Dock has the most to gain by saying McBeth was the shooter. But even if the jury decided that Dock was not the shooter, because Dock should have anticipated that the presence of guns might lead to a shooting, that should lead the jury to come to a unanimous guilty verdict for Dock on the capital murder charge, Hanna said.

“McBeth is telling you what he is planning,” Hanna said, talking about a text message sent from McBeth. “I’m kicking in the door, firing a warning shot and if somebody gets killed, fine.”

Hanna also said that investigators recovered computer searches that revealed that five days after the murder, Dock made searches on accessory to murder, whether Apple releases phone records, and resetting and deleting information from an iPhone.

“In trials like these, you get into a position where you start arguing too much about the law,” Hanna said. “The law is what everything is based off of. But what it all boils down to is a man has lost his life. There’s a family that is in need because of what he did,” Hanna said pointing at Dock.

Russell may have helped sell marijuana, Hanna said.

“But he did not deserve to be treated like this,” he said.

This story includes information from Star-Telegram archives

This story was originally published October 4, 2018 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Jury sends former college football player to prison for life for murdering a Fort Worth father."