DALTON, Ga. -- When investigators found convenience store clerk Dahyabhai Kalidas Chaudhari dead in the kitchen last year, a knife wound in his side and duct tape across his face, they also spotted a cellphone under the fryer.
On that phone, they found Skyy Raven Marie Mims' modeling pictures. Media outlets across the state displayed Mims' face, and an anonymous caller told the Whitfield County Sheriff's Office that Mims was living in a house in Cartersville.
Police found her upstairs, naked and alone, begging them to end her life. They also found a stack of scratch-off lottery tickets from Chaudhari's convenience store, gloves with Mims' and Chaudhari's DNA, and a filet knife stained with the victim's blood.
In his opening statement Monday, Conasauga Judicial Circuit District Attorney Bert Poston told a Whitfield County jury that this evidence proves Mims, 22, killed Chaudhari. She faces charges of murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery, burglary, possession of a weapon while committing a crime and bringing stolen property into the state.
The trial resumes this morning, and Poston expects to call witnesses through the end of the week.
Mims, an aspiring rapper, dancer, fashion designer and model, moved to the Atlanta area from Detroit in February 2014, about one month before Chaudhari's death. She hoped to make connections in the entertainment industries.
Without enough money in her bank account to even buy a Red Bull at the gas station after she moved, Poston said Mims saw salvation in the Georgia Lottery's "$500 a Week for Life" game.
"If I had $500 a week to live on," Poston said to the jury, supposedly quoting what Mims told her roommate, "I could get going on this career."
Poston said she surveyed at least two other convenience stores before settling on the Kankus Express at 3385 Airport Road, where Chaudhari worked. There, with no customers inside, surveillance footage shows someone in a white hoodie and sunglasses chasing Chaudhari to the kitchen with a pellet gun and a knife.
Chaudhari tried to shut the door, but the killer caught it, pushed it open. Chaudhari fell down. Standing over him, the killer slashed a knife back and forth, cutting Chaudhari's right arm and plunging the knife into his side, slicing his aorta.
The killer then pulled tape over Chaudhari's mouth and nose and pressed against his face, trying to suffocate him. When Chaudhari died, Poston said, the killer took hundreds of dollars from the cash register and about 80 scratch-off "$500 a Week for Life" lottery tickets.
Defense attorney Carla Marable told the jury Monday that Chaudhari's murderer is actually another woman from Mims' Detroit neighborhood who visited North Georgia around the same time. Pointing out that sunglasses conceal the killer's face in security footage, Marable said that Mims' neighbor, Keisha Jones, is also a tall, thin black woman.
"[Mims and Jones] could be identical twins," Marable said. "Why didn't the state not try to find Keisha Jones?"
Marable also blamed Kyle Hardwood, a Detroit man living in the Atlanta area. She said that Hardwood convinced Mims to move to Georgia because he was a music producer and friends with rappers Rick Ross and Jeezy.
Mims and Hardwood lived with Hardwood's girlfriend, Shelby Vasquez, and Vasquez's mother, Catherine Robinson. Marable said that Jones lived with them too and became jealous of Mims.
While the DNA on the killer's gloves matches Mims', Marable told the jury there was also unknown DNA that investigators did not test. She believes that was Jones' and that both women wore the gloves, making it hard to say who put them on before killing Chaudhari.
And while Mims told investigators to kill her when they found her, Marable said her client believed she was getting arrested for a separate active warrant for destruction of property from a separate incident. Marable said Mims was paranoid about a minor arrest because she had been smoking a lot of marijuana and ingesting MDMA, a type of ecstasy.
"Things are not always what they seem," Marable told the jury.
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at tjett@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6476.