Man says he was fighting fellow Hampton U. student in 2005 when friend stabbed him
Just after 12:30 a.m. on July 17, 2005, a group of about 10 friends — all students at Hampton University — showed up at the Bahir Dar, an Ethiopian restaurant in downtown Hampton.
But when the students walked upstairs to the second-floor dance area at the East Queens Way club, David Ifill — then an HU sophomore — spotted several members of the school’s football team.
Ifill warned his friends, he said, because he and others in his group had been having some beefs with football players.
Only a few minutes after they arrived, Ifill testified, Byron J. Bryant, a 20-yearold HU senior football player from Houston, walked up to him.
“Byron was a big dude,” Ifill testified at Hampton General District Court Thursday. “I never weighed him, didn’t take his height. But I just knew I did not want to fight him.”
“He immediately attempted to swing at me,” Ifill said. “I ducked and grabbed him by the waist,” and “we began tussling back and forth.”
They fell to the floor, he said, still grappling.
But at one point — either before or after they endedup on the floor — Bryant was stabbed in the back and neck.
Ifi l l testified Thursday that he didn’t stab Bryant — and initially didn’t know he was stabbed. But Ifill said another friend “grabbed meand said we had to go.”
“We ran to the stairs and tumbled down the stairs,” he said. “We rushed out of the club.”
Ifill said that he, a friend named Jihad Amir Ramadan — then an 18-year-old rising sophomore at HU —and another friend named “Drew” ran outside the club toward Drew’s car.
“I didn’t understand why we were running,” Ifill testified. “I said I would rather fight and lose than go back to campus after running away like that.”
But as they drove away, Ifill testified, one of the men — he’s not sure which — told him that Ramadan had stabbed Bryant.
The three men stopped off at a Hampton apartment, he said, then began driving to New York, where all three were from. Bryant was first taken into the men’s room by his friends, and then outside. Police found Bryant on the ground, with stab wounds to his neck and back, and he died at a hospital about two hours later.
Police said at the time that a witness saw a manstabbing Bryant, then leaving with another man in a Honda Accord with New York plates. A woman found the knife and threw it into the water behind what was then the Radisson Hotel.
When Ifi l l , Ramadan and Drew arrived at Ifill’s mother’s home in New York, he testified, they spoke with his mother and stepfather.
Ifill said his mother soon asked him if he had committed the stabbing. “I didn’t respond and looked down,” he testified.
But then, according to Ifill, Ramadan spoke up: “I did it,” he said.
“We need to get him home to his family,” Ifill’s mother said.
Ifill said he dropped Ramadan off at his family’s home in Queens — and never saw him again until Thursday’s court hearing.
Ramadan was on the run for the next 14 years, on the lam from a Hampton second-degree murder charge.
The U.S. Marshals eventually offered a $10,000 reward in the case. The stabbing was also featured by
“America’s Most Wanted” several years ago and was featured on a show on the Investigation Discovery network.
Ramadan, now 34, turned himself in to the U.S. Marshals in September 2019, and is being held at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail. He appeared at Thursday’s probable cause hearing by a teleconference hookup.
Ifill, now in the Navy, was flown in from an overseas duty station for the hearing.
After the testimony from Ifill — the prosecution’s only witness in the case — Ramadan’s attorney, James Broccoletti, sought to get the murder charged reduced to manslaughter.
The lawyer contended that Bryant was killed in a “melee” — with a “provocation” from Bryant leading to an act “in the heat of passion.”
“That’s their evidence, not my evidence,” Broccoletti said, saying that “malice cannot coexist with heat of passion.”
But Hampton General District Court Judge Tonya Henderson-Stith declined to reduce the charge, certifying the second-degree murder count to a grand jury in Hampton Circuit Court.
A Circuit Court hearing has been scheduled for Oct. 27.