They robbed a drug dealer. Then one killed the other, police say
Second-degree murder charge laid; judge refuses request for bail
NORFOLK — Two men robbed a drug dealer of his weed. When they met later to split what they had stolen, one shot the other in the heart, police say.
And so Michael Perry is dead and Raphael Cuffee is charged with second-degree murder in the Oct. 10 shooting.
On Tuesday, Cuffee went to court asking to be released on bond as his case goes through the courts. District Judge Robert Rigney refused, saying the charges were too serious.
Around 6 p.m. Oct. 10, Norfolk police went to the 3100 block of Chesapeake Blvd. to check out a report of a car crash.
When officers got there, they found Perry, 35, in the driver’s seat of a Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan with multiple gunshot wounds. He was taken to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where he died.
Prosecutor Katie Beye told the judge that detectives homed in on a description of the car they believed was involved in the shooting: a silver Nissan Altima with a large dent on the left driver’s side.
Four days later, a sergeant from the homicide unit was working an unrelated case when he spotted a car matching that description.
The driver, 28-year-old Cuffee, was detained and taken to the Police Operations Center on East Virginia Beach Boulevard.
During the ensuing interview, Cuffee confessed to shooting Perry, Beye said. He told detectives he and Perry had robbed a Grandy Village drug dealer of his weed, but Cuffee had kept all of it.
The two were meeting on Oct. 10 so Cuffee could give Perry his half.
Cuffee and Perry had “a life of crime together,” Beye told the judge.
Instead, Cuffee told the detectives, he felt threatened by Perry’s body language and started shooting.
After killing Perry, Cuffee fled, eventually giving the 9mm pistol he’d used to a “crackhead” to get rid of. Still, when police searched his car less than a week later, they found a loaded .45-caliber handgun in his glove box.
Police found no guns in Perry’s Mercedes, Beye said.