Xavier Pinckney Sentenced for Obstructing Dime Doe Murder Case
Pinckney pled guilty to providing false statements to investigators about Doe's murder and her assailant, Daqua Ritter.
A South Carolina man was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison for obstructing an investigation related to the murder of a transgender woman.
Xavier Pinckney, 24, pleaded guilty in October to providing false and misleading information to authorities about the murder of Dime Doe, a.k.a Pebbles LaDime Doe.
Prosecutors claimed that, in December 2019, Pinckney had lied to investigators who were looking into Doe’s death, and warned a friend, Daqua Lameek Ritter — who was in New York at the time — not to return to South Carolina because police were looking for Ritter and that someone was “snitching” about Ritter’s past relationship with Doe.
According to court documents, Pinckney admitted to concealing the fact that his phone had been used to call and text Doe on the day of her murder and lied to investigators about seeing Ritter on that day.
In February 2o24, a federal jury found Ritter guilty on hate crime charges, a firearms charge, and obstruction of justice in relation to Doe’s murder, marking the first-ever conviction under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act for violence directed at a transgender person.
At Ritter’s trial, prosecutors argued that he had been involved in a sexual relationship with Doe, and became upset after rumors of their affair began to circulate around their hometown of Allendale, South Carolina.
While Doe’s transgender identity was publicly known to many, Ritter sought to keep their relationship covert, demanding that she delete text messages they had exchanged from her phone.
After Ritter’s main girlfriend learned of the ongoing relationship between him and Doe, Ritter allegedly became more anxious and desperate to conceal the affair from others. On August 4, 2019, he then lured Doe to a remote area outside of Allendale and shot her three times in the head with a .22 caliber handgun.
Friends, acquaintances, and even family members later told investigators that they saw Ritter empty a book bag — filled with the clothes he had been wearing at the time of Doe’s disappearance — into a fire inside a barrel, and asked another acquaintance to dispose of the handgun. Still others claimed he had either confessed to, or implied he had a role in, Doe’s murder.
Meanwhile, investigators were able to link Ritter to the crime using body camera video from a traffic stop and DNA evidence from the inside of Doe’s car.
It was at this point that Ritter became a primary suspect and fled the area, and that Pinckney attempted to mislead investigators regarding Ritter’s role in Doe’s murder.
Federal prosecutors cast Pinckney’s sentence as part of a process of obtaining justice for Doe and her family.
“Pinckney’s obstruction delayed our investigation and delayed justice for Dime Doe,” U.S. Attorney Adair Boroughs, of the District of South Carolina, said in a statement. “Fortunately, Pinckney confessed his lies and his role in the coverup of her murder. This sentence underscores that no one who stands in the way of justice will go unpunished.”
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