Former Miami, Maryland S Avantae Williams charged with second-degree murder
Show Caption
Hide Caption
Former Miami Hurricane, Maryland Terrapin charged with Florida murder
Avantae Williams, who played football at Miami and Maryland, was in a Volusia County Jail after DeLand police charged him in a fatal May 3 shooting.
Former Miami and Maryland football player Avantae Williams has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder in connection to a shooting on Saturday, according to a DeLand Police Department news release.
Williams — a former top-50 ranked prospect out of DeLand High School in DeLand, Florida — turned himself in to police at a lawyer's office on Monday with no incident, according to The Daytona Beach News-Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network.
As of Wednesday morning, Williams was in the Volusia County Branch Jail without bond, per the News-Journal.
Per the DeLand news release, officers responded to a shooting around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday at a bar in DeLand, Florida. Witnesses told investigators a fistfight broke out between several people in the bar, before one of the men pulled out a firearm and started shooting, according to the news release.
Police said Keshod Harris, 32, was shot and killed. A bartender was also injured in the shooting, sustaining gunshot wounds to both hands. They were treated with non-life-threatening injuries.
As reported by the News-Journal, Harris got into an argument at 1:25 a.m. at McCabe's Bar — less than 20 minutes from Stetson University in Florida — with Damian "D" Ramsey, who was there with Williams and another man, per an affidavit.
Harris, Williams and Ramsey had previously left a celebration at the Chisholm Community Center after Harris had arrived there and argued with his girlfriend. The News-Journal reported that Ramsey had previously tried "to be with her romantically," before Saturday's shooting.
Per the News-Journal, Harris and Williams began fighting, with Harris punching Williams in the jaw. Ramsey then stood up and punched Harris in the back of the head. Williams pushed Harris away, grabbed a gun from his right pocket and fired into Harris' left rib cage. Williams reportedly ran past Harris, who was motionless on the ground, and shot him in the back before running out of the bar with Ramsey.
Harris was pronounced dead after he was transported to AdventHealth DeLand. The News-Journal reported that an autopsy of Harris revealed he had been shot seven times, with six bullets remaining in his body.
Williams fled the scene with Ramsey. The News-Journal reports a witness identified Williams from a photo lineup, and that police had picked up an iPhone that Williams set down when he fought Harris. The News-Journal also notes that police used a license plate detection system to identify the vehicle in which Williams left the scene. It was determined to belong to an "associate" of Williams, and was seized as evidence.
Williams was the No. 45-ranked player and No. 2 safety of the 2020 recruiting class, according to 247Sports' Composite rankings. He had 30 total tackles in his career across two seasons at Miami and another at Maryland. He last played in 2023.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Atlantic
31 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump's Epstein Denials Are Ever So Slightly Unconvincing
The president is not behaving like an innocent man with nothing to hide. Stephanie Keith / Getty July 23, 2025, 10:57 AM ET Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You'd probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You'd demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly. Donald Trump's behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that. The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men's friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. 'I never wrote a picture in my life,' he told the Journal —an oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written 'may every day be another wonderful secret' to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trump's well-documented penchant for doodling. On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal 's owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is 'fake news,' that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch's ethics rather than his own. Helen Lewis: MAGA influencers don't understand what journalism is Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadn't) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent a bipartisan Senate committee investigation all concluded it had done). Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama. 'I don't really follow that too much,' he said of the Epstein matter. 'It's sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.' Trump has yet to specify why the 'witch hunt' he's been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new 'witch hunt' he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address. In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as a part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 election. ('And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.') You might think that this link would increase Trump's curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time! By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound more world-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump's position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein's crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election (i.e., 100 percent real). Ashley Parker and Jonathan Lemire: Inside the White House's Epstein strategy Yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, faced with demands by some Republican members to pass a nonbinding resolution calling for full disclosure of the government's files relating to the Epstein investigation, announced that he would instead shut down the House for summer recess. Given that Trump had previously been eager to squeeze as many working days out of his narrow legislative majority as he could get, and the impression in Washington that Johnson will not so much as go to the bathroom without Trump's permission, declaring early recess communicates extreme desperation on the part of the president. Also yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was releasing thousands of pages of documents relating to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It is difficult to see why this disclosure was suddenly necessary. Trump's contention that the Epstein scandal is too dull and familiar to be worth discussing seems to be ever so slightly in tension with the notion that the death of Martin Luther King in 1968 is fresh material. If anything, the disclosure of documents nobody asked to see painfully highlights his unwillingness to disclose the documents everybody is clamoring for. If the police ask to look in your basement for a missing hitchhiker recently spotted in your car, and you offer to let them inspect your desk and closet instead, this will not dispel suspicions about what a basement inspection might reveal. Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.
Forbes
2 hours ago
- Forbes
Apple Issued A New Spyware Warning To Iranians—What To Know
Researcher believed Iran's government is behind the Apple spyware attacks. Apple has been issuing spyware warnings for some time, to alert those targeted by the dangerous malware so they can take action. Recently, one of these warnings was targeted at Iranian dissidents living in the country and overseas, according to a report in Bloomberg. The claims come from a report by Miaan Group, a digital rights organization that focuses on Iran, and Hamid Kashfi, an Iranian cybersecurity researcher who lives in Sweden. The pair told TechCrunch they had spoken to Iranian iPhone users who have received the Apple notifications over the last year. 'Two people in Iran come from a family with a long history of political activism against the Islamic Republic. Many members of their family have been executed, and they have no history of traveling abroad,' Amir Rashidi, Miaan Group's director of digital rights and security, told TechCrunch. 'I believe there have been three waves of attacks, and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.' Iranian iPhone Users Targeted Ahead of Iran-Israel War The spyware victims' iPhones were hit ahead of the Iran-Isarel war, raising interesting questions about who could have been behind the attacks. More than a dozen Iranian iPhone users were identified as having been targeted by the government spyware, but human rights groups estimate that this is just a fraction of the total. The attacks could have been perpetrated by another nation state, such as Israel — or even in a joint initiative with the U.S. This has happened before, in 2010, when the two are alleged to have been behind a devastating attack on an Iranian nuclear facility using a worm called Stuxnet. However, Miaan Group's Rashidi told TechCrunch he believes Iran's government is behind the Apple spyware attacks. Further investigation is needed, but there is no reason for members of civil society to be targeted by anyone else, he said. It is unclear which spyware maker is behind the recent attacks on iPhones. However, the most recent reports have seen Paragon Graphite target devices. The news that Iranian dissidents were targeted comes as researchers at Lookout identified Iranian government affiliated threat group MuddyWater using DCHSpy spyware to attack Android users. DCHSpy collects WhatsApp data, accounts, contacts, SMS, files, location and call logs — and can record audio and take photos. I asked Apple to comment on this latest report and will update this article if the firm replies. Spyware Targeting iPhones — What To Do I have covered numerous reports of spyware targeting iPhone users, with variants including Pegasus and LightSpy which take advantage of unpatched software vulnerabilities. It's therefore integral that people who could be attacked keep their iPhones up to date. In addition, turning your iPhone on and off again can disrupt the malware, temporarily disabling it. Apple itself recommends Lockdown Mode, which reduces the functionality of your iPhone but also stops spyware from taking hold. If you do think you're a victim of spyware, or if Apple has sent you a notification, contact Access Now or Amnesty for help.
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Epstein brother: White House claim ‘blatant lie'
Mark Epstein, the older brother of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, refuted the White House's claims that President Trump never visited the convicted sex offender at his office. 'That's just another blatant lie,' the older Epstein said during a Tuesday appearance on CNN's 'Erin Burnett OutFront.' 'Because he was there. People that worked for Jeffrey in his office, they could testify that they saw Trump in Jeffrey's office on numerous occasions,' he continued, 'So for him to say he wasn't there, all I can say is that's just just another lie.' Later on the show, Epstein accuser Maria Farmer appeared giving her account of the president's visit to the wealthy businessman's office decades prior to his death. Mark Epstein has repeatedly alleged that his brother was killed while in prison. A joint memo issued earlier this month from Trump's Justice Department and the FBI concluded that there is no evidence to support allegations that Epstein was murdered and that he did not keep a so-called 'client list.' 'Every time they say something or do something to try to quash the fact that he was most likely murdered, they just put their foot further down their mouth,' Epstein's brother told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo earlier this month, when asked why he doesn't believe the administration's latest explanation. The Trump administration in recent days has been roiled with speculation around its handling of the Epstein files, as calls grow for more transparency in the case. The president has repeatedly attempted to deny closeness to Epstein, who was accused of leading a sex trafficking operation involving underage girls. Trump's statements rejecting their relationship was befuddled last week by a Wall Street Journal article that unveiled an alleged correspondence between the two in 2003. The Journal reported that a letter, which appears to bear Trump's signature, was typed inside the outline of a naked woman and sent to Epstein. 'A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,' the final line reads, the Journal reported. In response, the president sued the outlet for defamation and has pressed his supporters to move on from the topic.
