De'Ondre White gets 30 years for fatal Sixth Street shooting in 2021
A jury sentenced De'ondre White to 30 years in prison for the murder of 25-year-old Doug Kantor in a shooting on Sixth Street in 2021 that injured 14 other people. The jury deliberated for more than five hours before reaching the sentencing verdict on Thursday night.
After the sentencing, Joe Kantor, Doug Kantor’s father, took the witness stand and spoke to White during allocution, the part of the trial that allows victims to tell the defendant how they feel.
“My son is an amazing man and I say ‘is’ because he’s still with me,” Joe Kantor said. “He brought so much joy and hope to everyone he met.”
Joe Kantor said his son had a positive outlook that resonated with people and his “mere presence” brought out the best in them. “If you had met him and been fortunate enough to meet him, perhaps we would not be here tonight,” Joe Kantor told White.
Julia Kantor, Doug Kantor’s mother, then said that when her son was lonely, he would call her on the phone just to talk about recipes. He loved movies, liked to cook and loved to shop with her, she said. She said he bought his first house at age 23 and had planned to marry his girlfriend and have children. “He told me three weeks before he was murdered that his brother needed him and he was willing to put his career on hold so he could be there for him,” she said.
Doug Kantor was in Austin to celebrate receiving his MBA from the University of Michigan, his mother said. She saw him in the hospital after he was shot and thought he was going to survive.
“Instead, I walked out of the hospital carrying a brown paper bag with what was left of his blood-stained belongings,” she said.
Julia Kantor said she had become numb since losing him. “I am a robot, and every day is the same day,” she said, adding that she places her son’s ashes on the nightstand beside her when she sleeps and every morning she takes his ashes with her wherever she is in her house.
“The only small comfort I can get," she said, "is that I can hold the ashes close to me.”
Julia Kantor said to White, who was sitting with his lawyers after the sentencing, that he was “rotten to the core.” “You will continue to cause pain and destruction until the day you are put down,” she said. “You have destroyed so many lives of people you don’t know, and you could care less.”
Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza said in a statement after the verdict that "our office is committed to holding people who commit acts of gun violence accountable."
“In a split second, the lives of 15 people were changed forever by a senseless act of gun violence," Garza said. "We hope this verdict and sentence brings closure and peace to the victims and their families.”
As White walked out of the courtroom with his lawyers after the sentencing he glanced quickly at his mother, Joycelind White, who had been there every day of the trial. One of White's lawyers, Russ Hunt, said after the sentencing that he knew White was disappointed with the sentence the jury gave him. White will be eligible for parole after serving half of his sentence.
"His family is very disappointed with the verdict and the last thing he would want anybody to think is that he did this on purpose," Hunt said. "He feels terrible about what happened and feels terrible remorse about all the people that were injured."
Doug O'Connell, a lawyer who is personally representing Kantor's family, said outside the courtroom that the family was grateful to the jury for rendering the guilty verdict. "They wanted me to reiterate their thankfulness to the Austin police officers that ran toward the sound of gunfire and worked so hard to save Doug and provide first aid for all the other victims."
He said the Kantor family was also grateful to the "Austin citizens that have reached out with love and condolences."
Before jurors began deliberations on Thursday, they heard from the mother of one of the people that 21-year-old White was accused of shooting. She said her daughter was so seriously injured that she just wants to die.
Thelma Ramirez said in a video interview shown in court that her daughter was paralyzed from the shooting and will never be able to walk again. "She said she would prefer to be dead than to be the way she is right now," Ramirez said.
She said her daughter Jessica has five children. Her daughter and her daughter's five children have all moved into Thelma Ramirez's garage because Jessica can no longer take care of herself or her children, Ramirez said. She said her daughter can't feed or dress herself. She also said Jessica could not testify Thursday because she had a seizure when she found out Wednesday night that White had been convicted of murder.
After four hours of deliberation, a jury Wednesday night convicted White in the death of 25-year-old Douglas Kantor, a Michigan resident visiting Sixth Street who died at a hospital after he was hit by two bullets. White, 21, also injured 14 other people on Sixth Street on June 12, 2021, after firing eight shots from his gun. He was charged with 14 counts of aggravated assault in connection with that. Those charges are still pending against him.
Julia Kantor, the mother of Doug Kantor, testified in court Thursday about how her son's death had affected her family.
“Doug was the bedrock of the family,” she said. “He was involved in everything in our lives. He was interested in everything we were doing. His friends would be over all the time. It was a lively house.”
Julie Kantor said she deals with her own pain about her son’s death internally, and “it just eats at you constantly.” She also spoke about seeing a video shown in court during the trial that included her son reaching to the police for help after he had been shot.
“I don’t know how I will ever get over that,” she said.
Douglas Kantor, 25, had just finished his master's degree at the University of Michigan and had been working at Ford Motor Co. while in school.
Adrianna Salazar, another shooting victim, testified that she was shot in one of her thighs and that the bullet traveled through to her other leg. The bullet shattered her femur, and she now has a rod in one of her legs, she said.
Salazar said she had to use a wheelchair and then a walker and a cane and do six months of physical therapy to recover from the injury. "It was frustrating," Salazar said while quietly crying. "It was a long recovery."
In a video shown in court of what happened immediately after the shooting, Salazar was seen laying on the street crying and screaming when police first arrived to help her.
As Salazar testified Thursday, White, seated beside his lawyers, began to quietly cry.
Another of the victims, Miguel Soto, said he was shot in the right leg and as he was bleeding on the ground, he phoned his 5-year-old son because he thought he was going to die from the wound.
The last witness to testify for the prosecution before the jury started deliberating on the sentence was Austin police Detective Israel Pina, who said White had posted several pictures of himself with guns on his iCloud account before the shooting.
In one of the pictures shown in court, White was holding a Glock pistol. He also posted a meme shown in court that said, "Shoot First Don't Ponder."
A video was shown in court in which White is shown holding his phone and looking at his hair while a song played in the background with lyrics that said "something to the effect that we run around killing people," said Pina. Pina said the video was posted the day after the shooting and showed that White had dyed his hair to change his appearance.
White’s aunt, Ruth Collins, testified during the sentencing hearing that he had lived with her and her children since 2008 in Killeen. She said his father wasn’t involved in his life and that his mother was involved “on and off.” White made good grades, went to class every day, graduated from a Killeen high school and then went to a welding school in Houston, she said.
The welding school “worked out” for about eight months and then White moved back to Killeen in May 2021, Collins said. She said on the night before the shooting, she had given him money to go to Houston to celebrate a friend’s birthday. She said she had no idea he had gone to Austin until police called her about a week later.
A neighbor of Collins', Herb Loring, also testified in a video that White had been in his youth group that helped raise money for charities for 10 years.
After all the witnesses finished testifying in the sentencing hearing, the attorneys made their closing arguments with prosecutor Habon Mohammed asking for at least a 40-year prison sentence for White, while defense attorney Russ Hunt asked that the jury consider at least five years but less than 20 years.
Hunt said that White was not a bad person. "He is not such a danger that you have to lock him away for an extended period of time," said Hunt.
More: De'ondre White found guilty of murder in 2021 Sixth Street shooting
White had no previous criminal record, Hunt said. "He feels terrible about the damage he has done," Hunt said.
He also said there were plenty of people who want to be involved with White's life and help him after he gets out of prison.
Mohamed said the jury should not only consider Doug Kantor's death when sentencing White but also should think about the 14 other people he injured.
"In a matter of 10 to 15 seconds, he forever altered the lives of 15 people," she said.
The shooting was the worst mass casualty event in Austin in the past decade. The punishment for murder ranges from five to 99 years in prison.
More: Expert links casings found on Sixth Street to De'ondre White's gun used in mass shooting
Witnesses said during the trial that there was an altercation between two teens from Killeen that preceded the shooting. White testified he shot in self-defense to protect himself and his friends after seeing one of the teenagers involved in the altercation, Tyshawn Degrate, start to pull out a gun.
Other witnesses in the trial said they never saw Degrate pull out a gun.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: De'Ondre White gets 30 years for fatal Sixth Street shooting in 2021
