A Broward County grand jury indicted a Miami Gardens man on charges of first-degree murder and other felonies in the death of Daneshia Heller on Feb. 17, 2026. Heller was killed inside a Fort Lauderdale apartment. Police say he also shot and wounded another woman earlier that day.
Miami Herald File
A Miami Gardens man charged in a grisly murder inside a vacant Fort Lauderdale apartment last month shot and wounded another woman hours before the killing, police say.
Altavious Powell, 33, was already sitting in a Broward County jail this week on charges of killing Deneshia Heller, the 30-year-old mother whose body was found stuffed in a dumpster behind the Alden Apartments complex at Northwest 15th Avenue on the morning of Feb. 18.
Detectives say she was shot and killed inside one of the units in the complex the day before. A grand jury indicted Powell on a charge of first-degree murder in Heller’s death last week.
Fort Lauderdale detectives said Monday that Powell shot and wounded another woman, who was not named by police, earlier on the same day of Heller’s killing. Officers found her with non-life-threatening injuries around 2:15 p.m. at Northwest Sixth Street and Ninth Avenue, said Casey Liening, a Fort Lauderdale police spokeswoman.
The woman initially refused to cooperate with detectives, “which led to a significant delay in FLPD’s investigation,” Liening said.
According to Powell’s arrest warrant, he confessed in a text message to a woman who is the mother of one of his children that he killed Heller. He also indicated in the text that he killed another person, according to a photo of the text included in the warrant, likely referring to the wounded woman.
“I have 2 body’s [sic] in my bathroom,” the text reads. Detectives wrote in the warrant that Powell blamed the woman for “driving him to kill two people.”
Heller’s mother, Temekia Connor, describes her daughter in a GoFundme page to raise money for her children and funeral costs as “a loving mother, daughter, and friend, and her absence has left a void that can never be filled.”
The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded Heller died from a gunshot wound to the head, according to the warrant. When police found her body, she was naked and covered by a piece of cardboard, according to the warrant.
Detectives viewed security-camera footage from an elementary school next to the apartment complex. The video showed Powell lead Heller to the empty unit around 4 p.m. the afternoon of the murder. Around 6:40 p.m., Powell is seen on security-camera footage from the complex dragging a “heavy object” outside of the unit to the dumpster, according to the report.
It took Powell about 40 minutes to drag the body to the dumpster, with him “leaning back with all his weight” and taking several cigarette breaks in the process, according to the warrant.
Detectives found a bloody trail inside the apartment leading all the way to the dumpster, according to the warrant. They lifted a palm print that was in the shower and matched prints on file for Powell, who is a convicted felon on a 2009 armed-robbery charge, detectives stated.
On Feb. 19, detectives were watching Powell as he got out of a white Ford Expedition SUV on the 1000 block of Northwest 14th Street, according to another report. They said he was clutching what looked like a gun in the waistband of his pants. When they approached Powell, he ran, but tripped in front of a parked Toyota Corolla, according to the report.
Cops say he wasn’t in possession of a gun when they subdued him, but they found a black Ruger pistol in the hedges next to him and concluded in their report that he tossed the weapon.
Along with first-degree murder, the grand jury also charged Powell with armed kidnapping, armed sexual battery, attempted first-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to the indictment. He’s being held without bond at Broward County’s Main Jail in Fort Lauderdale.
His attorney did not immediately respond to the Miami Herald’s request for comments.
Miami Herald
David Goodhue covers the Florida Keys and South Florida for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald. Before joining the Herald, he covered Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.