A Kingston man serving 15 years behind bars for his role in a June 2014 shootout at a city housing complex is one of three men accused of a prison yard murder at an upstate correctional facility.
Devin Gray, 22, has been in prison since February 2015 when he was sentenced to 15 years following his conviction on a single count of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. Cops say Gray, armed with a 9 mm rifle, exchanged gunfire with another man on a street dividing the Stuyvesant Charter and Colonial Gardens housing complex’s back on June 3, 2014. Gray was wounded by a shotgun blast to the stomach in the shootout. A second shotgun blast struck a second-floor apartment, narrowly missing a woman and two children inside. Cops say the gunplay followed an escalating dispute between Gray, who was visiting a friend at Colonial Gardens, and Eric Harris who was staying with his child’s mother at Stuyvesant Charter. Harris would later claim that he fired in self-defense after Gray pointed his rifle at him. The charges against Harris were dismissed, according to Kingston City Court.
Back on May 8, 2015, Gray was serving time at the Attica Correctional Facility in Batavia when, authorities say, he and two other inmates attacked Rodney Calloway, a 26-year-old Brooklyn man serving a 20-year sentence for robbery and assault. The assault took place in the prison’s “A” Yard; when it was over, Calloway was dead from a single stabbing wound to the heart.
“This was a plan by three individuals to severely injure if not murder another inmate,” said Wyoming County Assistant District Attorney Eric Schiener.
Last week Gray, along with codefendants Shawn Avery, 35, and Bruce Battle, 33, were indicted on charges of second-degree murder and conspiracy by a Wyoming County grand jury. (Battle faces an additional felony charge of promoting prison contraband.) Schiener said the indictment followed an 11-month investigation by state police and added that the investigation was prolonged by the need to interview and evaluate some 200 potential witnesses who were in Attica’s A Yard at the time of the attack and hundreds more who could have witnessed the murder from cells overlooking the recreation area. Schiener said that the investigation was also complicated by potential witnesses’ fear of retaliation in what he said was likely a gang-related murder.
“The old adage ‘snitches get stitches’ is very much alive and well in Attica,” said Schiener. “It’s very difficult to get information out of people, especially when there’s a gang angle as we believe there might be this case.”
Gray currently has a release date of April 2027. If he’s convicted in Calloway’s murder, he faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in state prison.
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