A Georgia man was robbed and fatally shot in the head after he was lured into meeting his killer on a dating app.
Mark Antonio White, 23, was found guilty of felony murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery, and possession of a firearm in the robbery of the victim in 2021, according to the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office.
White was convicted and sentenced to life in prison plus five years without the possibility of parole for using the online dating app as a cover to rob and kill 39-year-old Garcia Danielle Gaddis.
Gaddis had gone out on the “date” on the evening of October 21 2021 but was never seen alive again.
Three days later police were alerted about a suspicious Dodge Ram 1500 truck parked in a Lawrenceville neighborhood . Inside the car, police found Gaddis’ body “with a single gunshot wound to his head” and his valuables including his cell, wallet, and car keys were all reported to be missing.
On the night he was last seen, investigators discovered that Gaddis had been contacted by a man they eventually determined was White on the Tagged dating app.
After exchanging several messages, the duo had scheduled to meet up near the Little Suwanee Pointe neighborhood. But when he drove to the location, White messaged Gaddis to pick him up near a pool area.
Surveillance cameras showed that Gaddis drove his truck through the neighborhood shortly after 11pm and picked up a Black man with shoulder-length dreadlocks from the parking lot of the pool clubhouse, prosecutors said.
Minutes later, the truck was seen driving toward the entrance of the Lawrenceville neighborhood and the same dreadlocked man was seen walking from the entrance back to the pool clubhouse where Gaddis had collected him.
When authorities searched Gaddis’s Dodge truck, shell casings were found in the cab which drew a match with casings fired from a gun in an earlier July 2021 incident.
At that time in July, White had been accused of shooting a round of bullets at his ex-girlfriend and her mother.
But the mother had collected the shell casings from the incident and held onto them until police contacted her when they began investigating Gaddis’s murder.
White was eventually tracked down on surveillance – dressed similarly to the man captured on the night of Gaddis’ murder – at an eviction from a townhome near the pool several weeks later.
He was apprehended in June 2022.
