To prosecutors, Deontae Rush was a man who stormed in to rob a Lincoln man of marijuana and killed him in the process. To the defense, he was a fall guy, framed by James Shekie's real killer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a murder case," Deputy Lancaster County Attorney Eric Miller said in opening statements Monday. "This is a case where Mr. Rush went into somebody's house, kicked the door open, encountered him in the bedroom, back against the wall, and he shot at him three times, hit him once and he killed him."
He said early Feb. 23, 2021, Rush kicked in the back door to Shekie's mobile home at Mark IV Estates near 20th and Superior streets to rob him of 4 pounds of marijuana, then fired off three rounds, hitting Shekie in the torso and leaving him to die.
Defense attorney Jeff Pickens pointed the finger at Marquis Moten, who is accused of conspiring with his sister, Anna Feilen, to commit the robbery.
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Attacking the state's assertion that Moten is paralyzed from the waist down, Pickens told jurors that inmates at the Lancaster County Jail say they've seen him get up and walk and that he told them he was the one who shot Shekie.
"And he got away with it because he's in a wheelchair," Pickens said.
Pickens said Rush was a "sacrificial lamb," framed because Moten had Rush's cellphone with him at the time.
Miller said a shoe print left on the door to Shekie's trailer ties Rush to the crime, in addition to his cellphone pinging off a nearby tower.
Rush faces charges of first-degree murder and use of a firearm to commit a felony for Shekie's killing, discovered the morning of March 1 after a neighbor called police to check on him because his door was wide-open on a chilly day with snow on the ground.
Police arrived to find it had been kicked in.
Body-worn camera footage shows the officers going in to find Shekie dead in the hallway.
He'd been shot six days earlier.
Miller said investigators learned siblings Moten and Feilen, a teenager who had lived with Shekie briefly, talked about stealing the marijuana she'd seen in his trailer.
Early Feb. 23, 2021, Moten and another man, allegedly Rush, came to Lincoln from Omaha, met up with Feilen, then drove to Shekie's place. The siblings would later tell police Rush went in alone and they drove away when they heard gunfire.
"They both indicate they were involved in this robbery. That they were going to get this marijuana from Mr. Shekie. They also indicated that killing Mr. Shekie wasn't really part of the plan," Miller said.
On March 4, 2021, police arrested Moten and Feilen after a search of Feilen's phone showed a Facebook Messenger conversation between them about the plan to rob Shekie.
Four days later, Rush was arrested in Chicago.
Pickens said the defense was going to be that Feilen hated Shekie and she also hated Rush because both men had kicked her out. He suggested a third person was involved. Just hours before Shekie was shot, he said, Moten messaged someone who went by Ermac (the name of a Mortal Kombat character) talking about a "sting on deck," and used an emoji to ask if he had any peppers, allegedly a veiled reference to guns.
He said cellphone records show Moten was the one flashing guns in selfies, not Rush, and he'd allegedly told his sister he wanted the marijuana however he had to get it.
Feilen and Moten are expected to enter pleas to conspiracy charges in a deal with prosecutors.