Danika Troy’s Killing Rattles the Florida Panhandle

A body in the woods. A girl who had a crush on a boy. And a confession that led to the arrest of two teenagers on murder charges.

The rumor Steve Williams heard was that there was a body in the woods.

Mr. Williams, 46, knew those woods well. The dense patch of trees, located in an area not far from Pensacola known as Floridatown, was where he had gone when he sneaked out at night as a teenager, where he had listened to Pearl Jam on the way to his friends’ homes and where he still came to ride dirtbikes.

When he set off into the forest, it was dark, foggy and wet, but before long he detected the smell of burnt brush. And then another smell, sulfurous and foul.

About two miles across town, Ashley Troy was worried sick. Her 14-year-old daughter, Danika, was missing.

The girl, a bold, fearless teenager who loved singing and drawing but had recently been sent to a new school after getting into trouble, had gone out on the night of Nov. 30 while her mother was sleeping. When Ms. Troy woke up the next morning, Danika and her electric scooter were gone.

“After checking with all friends and parents she’s nowhere to be found,” Ms. Troy wrote on Facebook. “I worry this is an internet thing with strangers…. Who knows at this point. So much lying.”

What the police and others uncovered over the following days has shaken communities across the Florida Panhandle, from Pensacola to the fast-growing suburbs of Milton and Pace, where Floridatown is located.

“A long time ago, I quit trying to figure out why certain people do certain things,” said Capt. Scott Jones, who leads the investigations division at the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office. In his mind, it can be simple: “Sometimes, evil people just do evil things.”

Danika Troy was born on Feb. 10, 2011, arriving with a cleft lip that required surgery, a condition that her mother said made her love her even more. “My girl needed me,” she said. As a baby, she was an easy child; she would sleep peacefully for eight hours and wake up with a big smile.

She grew up joyful and brave, her family said, climbing trees, playing instruments and running through backyards. Still, Ashley thinks her daughter always longed for a father; hers had been abusive before she was born, and she had never met him.

Lately, she’d had problems. This past fall, Danika, who often went by Dani, started at a new alternative school, High Road, after struggling to pass eighth grade. It is a school for students with academic or behavioral problems, or both. Records show that the year before, Danika had twice been reprimanded for bringing a vape to her previous middle school.

But at her new school, where students are required to wear uniforms and must have four weeks of unblemished good behavior to get special privileges, a classmate recalled that Danika liked to take one teacher’s cellphone and take pictures of herself making funny faces.

As a child, she had spent lots of time with her grandmother, Bonnie Troy, even living with her for a time. But her mother and grandmother had a falling out when Danika was about 6, and the two had essentially not spoken since. Bonnie Troy did her best to keep up with her granddaughter’s life from afar by having a former handyman send her screenshots of her daughter’s Facebook posts.

When she learned that her granddaughter was missing, she tried to do what she could to help, making “missing” posters with collages of images of Danika and pleading with friends to share them. She scoured social media and tried to understand what might have happened.

And then she sent a text to her daughter, for the first time in years.

“Let’s put aside our differences and bring our girl home,” she begged on Dec. 3, a few days after Danika had gone missing.

Ashley Troy texted her back about eight hours later: “It’s too late.”

Mr. Williams still shudders when he recalls what he saw, about 48 hours after Danika had gone missing, on the wooded trail. He has run a volunteer search and rescue group called Milton Search and Rescue for the last few years, but he hadn’t seen anything like this before. Catching the smell downwind, he held a flashlight in one hand and approached a darkened patch of ground next to a tree.

He looked closely and was able to make out a body, charred beyond recognition. And he saw a blue Jordan 1 Nike sneaker resembling one that Ms. Troy had included in one of her posts about Danika being missing.

Next to the body was a scooter charger, several shell casings, some live ammunition and a lighter, the police said. Mr. Williams said he also saw a gasoline can.

Someone else had earlier stumbled on the body and left without reporting it, taking the scooter, according to the police. That was what started the rumor that reached Mr. Williams, who called the police once he saw the body.

Captain Jones said the evidence suggested that Danika was shot several times and then burned.

The next day, on Dec. 3, the police arrested two suspects in what the sheriff later described as an investigation so easy it was considered a “ground ball.”

The break came when a 14-year-old boy named Kimahri Blevins wanted to get something off his chest, police officials said. He had confided in someone — a woman, but the police won’t say more than that — that he and another friend, 16-year-old Gabriel Williams, had planned and carried out the killing.

When he was interviewed by investigators, Kimahri disclosed that he and Danika had had a “falling out.” When an investigator asked him what had happened in the woods, Kimahri asked for a lawyer. But Gabriel gave a full confession, according to police reports, saying that Danika had “made hurtful comments” about his being “worthless and a gang-banger.” Captain Jones said that investigators were not sure about the boys’ full motivation — there could be more to the story — but that they didn’t yet have any information to contradict Gabriel’s statements.

Gabriel told the authorities that he had used a handgun that he had stolen from his aunt, whom he lived with, and said that both boys had shot Danika, Captain Jones said. When Kimahri confided to the woman who tipped off the police, he told her that the boys had planned to shoot Danika just once but that Gabriel had continued firing, a police report said.

Both boys attended Danika’s new school, High Road, and had been friends with her, Danika’s mother said.

Danika and the two boys had for years lived within a short walk of one another, and the woods. But recently, Danika’s family had moved about two miles away to the other side of a highway.

Ms. Troy, who responded to questions by text message, said her daughter had a crush on Gabriel and had snuck out in the past to see him, something she had been grounded for.

“So she got creative,” she said. “There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him.”

“Her desire for love from a boy led to her murder,” she added. “I was asleep when she died afraid.”

Danika had described Kimahri as like a brother to her, Ms. Troy said. Kimahri’s mother, Liella Parker, told the police that she had caught Kimahri returning home after sneaking out on the night that Danika was killed. He told her he had gone out to smoke a cigarette, but she did not smell any cigarette smoke on him, according to a police report.

Ms. Parker said in a phone interview that she was praying for Danika’s family. “I cannot imagine how hard this is for them,” she said.

“I can’t make sense of it because it’s senseless what happened, and nobody deserves that,” she said.

Asked specifically about her son, she said she did not want to discuss him. “That’s a long story with Kimahri,” she said. Gabriel’s family could not be reached for comment.

The boys have been jailed since they were arrested on Dec. 3, and on Friday, a grand jury indicted both as adults on a charge of first-degree, premeditated murder.

Now, Ms. Troy has been left to wonder what went wrong.

“I keep putting myself in her shoes as the boy she loved shot her,” she said.

Danika’s grandmother said she has seen signs of Danika’s presence since she passed away: the sun coming out after the rain, the lights flickering in her home, a dead cardinal that appeared one afternoon on her back porch.

She finally saw her daughter again — the first time since their falling out years ago — at a vigil last week at a church in nearby Milton. She gave her a hug.

Hundreds of people had turned out to pay their respects.

“She had a hold on a greater life, even though she had friends and acquaintances that were still steeped into the dark world,” Pastor Matt Cotten said. “If you’re stepping into the light, the friends that you’re hanging around can determine the quality and direction of where you’re headed.”

Ms. Troy said her younger daughter, Aria, cannot even think about what happened without crying. And what confounds Ms. Troy the most, she said, is trying to understand what would make someone do such a thing, other than simply a “desire to kill.”

“It can’t be real,” she said. “How can this be real.”

Kalyn Wolfe contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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