How a teen runaway exposed a house of horrors murder so gruesome that police didn’t believe it was real

Philadelphia police did not at first believe the teen girl who told them she’d witnessed a murder.

It was a cold morning in January 2020 when the officers responded to an unusual call. A counselor at a North Philadelphia charter school said a 15-year-old student told her she saw a man get killed over Christmas break.

The officers met with the girl, and the details she went on to share were like something out of a horror movie: Over the week of the Christmas holiday, she said, the people she was living with lured two young men to their North Philadelphia house, then beat and tortured them. One of the men escaped. The other died, and after they partially dismembered his body, she helped clean up the blood and dispose of the corpse.

“Can you take me to the body?” Sgt. Gregorrio Santiago asked, according to police body camera footage shown in court.

“Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Following her directions, Santiago drove to the Olney section of the city, where the girl pointed out the house on Fairhill Street where she said the crimes occurred. Then, she told him to drive around the corner, to a small overpass on Rockland Street.

“You’re sure this happened, right?” Santiago asked her skeptically.

“Yes,” she said again.

She pointed over the ledge, and there, about 20 feet below and barely visible in the brush, was a black trash can containing the mutilated body of Darius Cheeseboro, 23.

And, she said, she knew exactly who killed him.

The girl’s account, shared as she testified at a recent trial for one of the four killers, offered a disturbing look at one of the most heinous murders that Philadelphia has seen in years, and laid bare how the group calculated and carried out the vicious attacks.

“There was no rhyme or reason,” said Assistant District Attorney Ashley Toczylowski, who prosecuted the case. “The cruelty, the depravity, the maliciousness, the callousness. ... It’s hard to hear and comprehend.”

The details outlined in three days of testimony revealed not only the violence inside the Fairhill Street house, but also the resilience of the young man who barely escaped with his life, and the strength of the teen girl, a runaway, who ultimately reported the crimes to police.

Soon after the teen came forward to law enforcement, four people were arrested and charged with murder, conspiracy, abuse of a corpse, and related crimes: Lashawana Dantzler, 23; Zahmir Mason, 19; Jordan Oliver-Williams, 19; and Zamir Burton, 18.

The girl — whom The Inquirer is not identifying because she was a minor at the time and was not charged with a crime — was offered immunity in exchange for her testimony.

Dantzler agreed to plead guilty to third-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and related offenses, and told prosecutors she would testify against the others in hopes of getting a lesser sentence. Mason and Oliver-Williams also pleaded guilty to third-degree murder.

Burton decided to contest the charges at trial.

Dantzler kept her promise, and on a recent Wednesday she walked through the courtroom, took a seat across from Burton, and calmly described what he had done — and how she’d helped.

“I was tired of living in lies,” she told the jury about her decision to testify.

Dantzler said she and her three children had been homeless for months when a friend invited her to move into the house on Fairhill Street. She said she invited Mason, her new boyfriend, and another acquaintance, Oliver-Williams, to stay with her. Their friend Burton and the 15-year-old — his then-girlfriend — also moved in.

Dantzler previously had a relationship with Darius Cheeseboro, a 23-year-old from the neighborhood, and they’d recently reconnected on Instagram and started talking. But Mason was possessive, and when he found out, he wasn’t happy, she said. He told her to invite Cheeseboro over to the house. So she did.

“I thought they were gonna fight,” Dantzler said.

Instead, according to trial testimony, events unfolded this way:

About 11 p.m. on Dec. 20, 2019, Cheeseboro told his mother he’d be right back, then walked about a half-mile down the block to Fairhill Street.

Dantzler greeted him at the entrance and welcomed him inside.

But unbeknownst to him, Mason, Burton, and Oliver-Williams were hiding behind the door.

They jumped out and started beating Cheeseboro. Dantzler said she watched as they stabbed him more than 20 times and beat him with pots and pans. They dragged him out into the backyard, stripped off his clothes, and mutilated him. They stuffed his body in a trash can, then lit him on fire.

The men ordered Dantzler and the teen girl to clean up the pools of blood in the house. They complied.

“I had no feeling,” Dantzler said. “I was numb.”

Then, the group rolled the trash can out into the cold, dark streets. Mason and Burton dragged it about two blocks to a small bridge on Rockland Street and threw it over the ledge and into an open field.

Come morning, the 15-year-old girl was terrified. She had run away from home a few weeks earlier, and barely knew the people she had come to live with.

Now, they had involved her in a murder.

“I GOTTA TELL YOU SOMETHING,” she texted a friend the next morning. “I helped kill somebody yesterday.”

“WTF happened?” the friend asked.

“It was over nothing,” she said.

She was frightened and filled with dread, and didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t go home, she said, but worried that they might kill her next. She decided to stay quiet.

Meanwhile, Mason and Dantzler were plotting their next victim.

Dantzler had a casual relationship with Marquise Swinton-Carpenter a few months earlier, she said, and after he posted a sexually explicit video of her on social media, she wanted revenge.

“I wanted to get back at him for what he did to me,” she said. “I wanted him to feel the pain I felt.”

She waited until they were on good terms again, then invited him over.

Swinton-Carpenter, then 20 years old, came to the house on Dec. 26. Dantzler let him in, then said she’d be right back. She had to grab something from upstairs.

He took a seat on the couch. A few minutes later, Dantzler, Mason, Burton, and Oliver-Williams came down the stairs.

These are my brothers, Dantzler told him, and one by one, they shook his hand.

“That’s when I saw the knife come across,” Swinton-Carpenter told the jury.

Mason slashed him across his throat. Dantzler hit him with a bat while others took turns stabbing and beating him. Mason tried to cut his head off, Dantzler said, but “the knife was too dull.”

At one point, Swinton-Carpenter tried to escape. He got through the front door, but the group circled him. He tried to hold on to the edges of the door frame, but they ripped his fingers away and dragged him back inside.

They attempted to cut off his right hand, then took him into the backyard, doused him with lighter fluid, and briefly set him on fire. Assuming that he was dead, the group went inside.

Swinton-Carpenter said that when they tossed him in the yard, he hit his head and woke up. And when he saw the group go inside, he jumped up, threw himself over the back fence, and ran into the street. His abusers ran after him, but when they saw he’d collapsed at the feet of a bystander, who was calling for help, they ducked into the shadows.

Police Officer Troy Dighello arrived and found Swinton-Carpenter shoeless, unconscious, and spilling blood into the street. When Dighello turned him over to check his injuries — his throat slashed and hand nearly amputated — the officer jumped backward and gasped.

“That’s the first I’ve ever seen someone like that,” he said.

The guilt was eating away at the teen. She was present during the assault of Swinton-Carpenter, too, but this time took short videos of the attack for evidence, in case she ever needed it.

Cheeseboro’s family, meanwhile, had reported him missing after he didn’t come home that December night. They were posting fliers across their neighborhood and rallying groups to search the city for him. The father of two young daughters was devoted to his family, his mother had said, and would never just abandon them.

The girl ultimately decided that when she returned to school after winter break, she’d reveal what she’d seen. On Jan. 14, she walked through the doors, went straight to her counselor, and told her what had happened.

Within a week, the four were arrested.

At the trial, Burton’s lawyer, Angelo Cameron, tried to sow doubt in the girl’s story by noting that she initially had not told police that Burton was involved in the crimes. And Dantzler, he said, couldn’t be trusted.

“Her credibility is very suspect, her character disturbing,” he said.

The jury convicted Burton in September of third-degree murder, attempted murder, abuse of a corpse, conspiracy to commit murder, and related crimes. He avoided a first-degree conviction and will be sentenced in November. He will likely face decades behind bars alongside the others involved.

Common Pleas Court Judge Lillian Ransom sentenced Oliver-Williams to 30 to 80 years in prison, and Judge Giovanni Campbell sentenced Mason to 32 to 84 years. Dantzler is to be sentenced next month.

On the witness stand, Swinton-Carpenter, now 23, spoke of his recovery, which continues even three years later.

He was hospitalized for more than a month, he said, and couldn’t speak or eat solid foods for weeks as his neck healed. He endured three months of physical therapy to relearn how to walk and use his hand. He still struggles to put weight on his right leg and pain frequently shoots up his arm into his shoulder.

When asked about his mental state, he went quiet and looked down.

“I think about it every day,” he said.

But he’s trying to move his life forward. He’s in his final year of school to become an emergency medical technician, he said, and his life finally seems to be on track.

At the conclusion of his testimony, Swinton-Carpenter stood up slowly and walked out with a slight limp. Before he left the courtroom, he stopped and looked back at Burton one final time.

“I’d like to kill you,” he whispered under his breath.

As the jury deliberated the next day, he returned to the courthouse and sat with Cheeseboro’s family. They hugged and thanked him for testifying.

“I’m glad that you can share peace in yourself,” Cheeseboro’s sister said.

He nodded and said he thinks of her brother often.

“I would have rather they took my life than his,” he said. “He didn’t deserve that at all.”

They shook their heads, but said nothing.