Police: Teen admits killing schoolmate after fighting

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Jatwan Craig Cuffie, facing a first-degree murder charge, told police in Matthews, N.C., that a deadly fight in a Butler High School hallway Monday morning followed a fight in a Harris Teeter parking lot Friday night.

Cuffie, a 16-year-old high school freshman, has been charged in the death of Bobby McKeithen, who was also 16. Police accused Cuffie of shooting McKeithen to death around 7:15 a.m. in a crowded school hallway.

Arrest documents indicate that Cuffie said in his police interview that McKeithen punched him in the hall before he pulled out a gun and shot him.

He had taken the gun to school, Cuffie said, because he had been involved in a fight Friday night with other teenagers. One of the people on the other side of the fight pulled out a knife, he told police.

Cuffie and his friend ran away when the knife came out, he told police. He said McKeithen “saw everything,” according to the arrest documents, but he is not mentioned as one of the people physically involved in the Friday night fight.

Later in the weekend, a friend of the teen who allegedly had a knife asked Cuffie if he thought Cuffie won the fight, Cuffie said, according to arrest documents.

Cuffie said to ask McKeithen, who said the teen with the knife won the fight, according to the arrest documents.

A friend told Cuffie that one of the teenagers who fought him Friday was planning to fight him at school, Cuffie told officers.

Early Monday, Cuffie “went to the woods to get his gun for protection” and put it in his pocket, according to the documents.

Matthews police said Tuesday that the gun that shot McKeithen was stolen in August from a car in Gaston County.

The arrest documents also say Cuffie didn’t think the bullet struck McKeithen, and he was going to shoot again but ran away instead, according to his police interview.

He ran into a classroom and told his ninth-grade math teacher what was going on, the documents state.

“She asked him where the gun was and he told her (it was) in his book bag,” according to the documents. “And she moved the bag away from him.”

Soon after that, police arrived to take him into custody.