When the phone rang, Keisha Jones didn't know she was in the middle of a murder mystery.
But her friend told her to check the news, sending Jones a link to the WRCB-TV website. Jones, 35, of Detroit, watched a clip of the Skyy Raven Marie Mims trial in Whitfield County.
She stopped it after a few seconds. She thought the friend was making a corny joke. Yeah, this Mims woman was from Detroit, like her. And yeah, this woman was a rapper, like her. And sure, they both once dyed their Afros and have a similar complexion. So...
"It seems like a light-skinned problem," she thought, joking about their similarities.
But her friend told her to watch the news clip again. The whole clip. There, toward the end of the segment, Jones saw an old picture of herself on the screen. She heard Mims' attorney blame her for the murder of 37-year-old Dahyabhai Kalidas Chaudhari, who was stabbed to death in the Dalton convenience store where he worked in March 2014.
"How in the hell did they get my name?" she asked herself. "A million things ran through my mind. I got really paranoid. I thought they were coming for me."
Mims' attorney, Carla Marable, had two options for defending her client. She could say Mims killed 37-year-old Dahyabhai Kalidas Chaudhari in self- defense. Or she could say the police arrested the wrong woman.
The self-defense strategy wasn't feasible. Security footage captured the killer -- a thin black woman, her face covered by sunglasses and a hoodie -- chasing Chaudhari to a back room in the convenience store, stabbing him in the side with a fillet knife and holding his mouth and nose to suffocate him as he bled.
Watching the footage, Marable told the jury that Mims had been mistaken for the real killer.
Jones, who was born in Detroit, lived in Atlanta for about a decade before moving home in 2006. Marable said Jones could have been in Georgia around the time of the killing. Jealous that a man was more interested in Mims than her, she told the jury, Jones killed Chaudhari and fled town, knowing Mims would take the fall.
You can't see the killer's face in the video, Marable said. So can you prove the killer isn't Jones? She did not try to prove Jones was in Georgia when Chaudhari was killed.
The jury didn't buy it. Investigators had found Mims' cellphone next to Chaudhari's body. And when they arrested Mims, they found gloves with her DNA inside and his blood on the outside, as well as a knife and a roll of duct tape with his blood on it.
Skyy Mims looks around the courtroom on Friday, May 1, 2015. (Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen)After the trial, Marable said she didn't subpoena Jones because she couldn't find her. Jones' Facebook and Twitter accounts were shut down and she didn't live at the address on her driver's license.
"She fell off the face of the Earth," Marable said. "That's what makes me think she is the true killer. You can't find her."
Conasauga Judicial Circuit District Attorney Bert Poston said Marable told him in August she believed Jones killed Chaudhari. His office also tried in vain to contact Jones on Facebook.
Poston felt the evidence against Mims was overwhelming, so he didn't press hard to find Jones.
"You certainly feel bad for anyone who didn't do anything wrong and someone tries to pin a murder on them," he said after the jury convicted Mims of murder on May 1.
Jones said she never saw Facebook messages from the defense or the prosecution. She is popular in the Detroit hip-hop community. Strangers frequently send her messages online, asking her to collaborate.
Those unread messages stack up. She doesn't read all of them.
"I don't remember anyone contacting me about this at all," she said of the murder trial. "I would have used my own money to go down there and disprove this."
When she learned about the case, she checked her Facebook page and saw she had been in New Orleans when Chaudhari was killed. And though they live in the same city, Jones said she had never heard of Mims.
So how did she get tied into this case?
When Mims drove to Atlanta in January 2014 to make connections in the entertainment industry, she moved in with Kylle Alexander-Music Harewood, a hip-hop producer who used to live in Detroit.
They lived together for about a month. Mims reminded him of Jones, who he had worked with in Detroit. They have similar eyes, he said. Mims told him she didn't know Jones, so Harewood showed her a picture on Facebook.
About a month after Mims' arrest, Harewood said, some of Mims' family members called him. They asked about Jones.
Skyy Raven Mims enters the courtroom Tuesday at the Whitfield County Courthouse."Why you talking about Keisha?" he responded.
Then he realized: They were going to blame Jones. He didn't call her, though. If she knew, he thought, she might become scared and do something that looked suspicious.
A year later, when Jones saw the news segment, she didn't know any of that. All she saw was a 15-second clip of Marable cross-examining Harewood.
"She's from Detroit, she has connections here and she's friends with you," Marable said in court.
"Correct," Harewood responded.
Jones didn't hear the rest of Harewood's testimony and thought he was blaming her for the murder. So did some other Detroit rappers and music producers. Jones hears from someone new about once a day, all angry at Harewood.
Jones didn't hear his side of the story until he called last week. She wants him to stay in Georgia, at least until people in what Harewood calls his violent neighborhood in Detroit hear the truth.
"That's crazy," he said. "All I wanted to do was try to help (Mims)."
Jones is upset about the things said or suggested about her in court, but there's nothing she can do to restore her reputation because attorneys are protected from defamation lawsuits for statements made in court.
"I didn't want my face in the news all over the country," she said. "There's nothing you can do about it. It's kind of ridiculous."
But she said there's another way to set the record straight. Jones, who has been rapping since she was 11, plans to make a song about this once she's had time to process what happened.
When she writes her verses, though, she'll need a beat. Maybe, she said, one with the chorus of an old soul song, sped up and looped like the ones the Wu-Tang Clan used in the early '90s.
The type Harewood likes to make.
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at tjett@times freepress.com or at 423-757-6476.