When Their Dating App Scheme Turned Deadly

Just before dawn on May 17th, 2024, Fifth Avenue North in Minneapolis looked like any other quiet residential street.

The night had done its work: windows were dark, porches empty, and the city’s usual noise was muffled into a soft, early‑morning hush. Only the streetlights kept watch, their pale halos spilling over parked cars and worn sidewalks.

At 4:45 a.m., a Chevy Suburban rolled slowly up the block and stopped in front of a modest house. The engine idled for a moment, then cut off. To any half‑asleep observer, it might have looked like someone coming home from a night shift, or leaving early for a long drive.

A few seconds passed.

Then three sharp cracks ripped through the silence.

Gunshots.

The sound bounced off the houses and died in the air, leaving only the echo—and then a voice, raw with pain, begging for help.

Neighbors jolted awake. One woman pulled her curtains aside and froze. There, in front of the Suburban, a man lay on the pavement, clutching his body, screaming.

By the time anyone could process what they were seeing, a dark red SUV was already pulling away from the curb, disappearing into the thinning night.

On Fifth Avenue North, 28‑year‑old Devonte Jovon Adams was bleeding out on the street in front of someone else’s home.

The 911 Calls

In houses up and down the block, phones lit up.

One neighbor’s hands shook as she dialed 911, her voice trembling as the dispatcher came on the line.

“911, what’s the emergency?”

“Um,” she said, breathing hard, “we heard—there sounded like a gunshot, and there’s a guy on the ground screaming for help, and a red SUV pulled off.”

“Okay,” the dispatcher replied, voice sharpening. “Someone was shot?”

“Someone was shot at our house,” she said. “He’s on the ground, in front of a car.”

The dispatcher kept her on the line, asking for details: the street, the house number, the direction the SUV had gone. Sirens were already lighting up on consoles across the city.

“Everybody is on the way, okay?” the dispatcher assured her.

She stepped out onto her front porch, phone pressed to her ear, watching a stranger die.

Blood on the Pavement

Minutes later, patrol cars rolled onto Fifth Avenue North, their red and blue lights bathing the scene in a harsh, stuttering glow. Officers jumped out, weapons holstered but hands ready. The first priority was clear: find the victim, secure the scene, look for the shooter.

They didn’t have to look far.

Devonte Adams lay on the pavement next to the Chevy Suburban, his clothes soaked in blood. He had been shot multiple times in the span of just seconds: wounds to the left side of his face, his neck, chest, and torso.

He was still conscious when officers reached him, but barely.

“Stay with me,” one officer urged, kneeling in the blood, applying pressure where he could. “Stay with me, man. EMS is on the way.”

Adams tried to speak, but blood bubbled at his lips. His body jerked with pain, then sagged. The officer called for a medic with renewed urgency.

Paramedics arrived fast, but gunshot injuries to the face, neck, and chest are often unforgiving. They loaded him onto a stretcher, fighting for him all the way to Hennepin County Medical Center.

He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.

Back on Fifth Avenue, yellow tape unfurled, encircling the Suburban and the blood‑slicked pavement. Crime scene technicians began their work: photographing the area, placing little numbered markers next to spent shell casings, searching for bullets, footprints, anything.

Detectives canvassed the neighborhood, notebooks out:

What did you hear?
What did you see?
Had you seen that Suburban before?
Do you recognize the red SUV?

They didn’t yet know that the answers to those questions would be found not just on this block, but across the river, in a different city, inside a stolen vehicle and a young woman’s purse.

Three Days Later: A Stolen Suburban in St. Paul

The Chevy Suburban Devonte had driven to Fifth Avenue was gone.

Whoever had killed him took his vehicle too.

For three days, detectives hunted for that truck. Every license plate reader in the metro area was on alert. Patrol briefings included its description and plate number. It was entered as stolen, tied to a homicide.

Then, in St. Paul, officers spotted it.

Cameras on a patrol car read the plate of a Suburban in traffic. The system pinged: it was the vehicle linked to a homicide in Minneapolis.

The officers flipped on their lights.

The Suburban pulled over.

The stop that followed was textbook—and recorded on body cameras.

“Step out of the car,” an officer called. “Put your hands up.”

The driver complied, slowly. The air was tense; stolen vehicles often meant stolen guns, wanted suspects, people with nothing to lose. The officers moved methodically.

“Turn around. Hands up. Walk backwards to me. Stop. Get on your knees. Hands on your head.”

The driver obeyed, bewildered.

“What’s wrong?” he kept asking. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain everything in a second,” the officer said. “Right now, you’re sitting in a stolen car.”

“I bought the car,” the man protested. “I bought it!”

“Okay, we’re going to figure everything out,” the officer replied. “But right now, you’re in a stolen car.”

He was handcuffed and led away from the vehicle.

Inside the Suburban, a young woman sat in the passenger seat.

“Who’s in the car with you?” the officer asked the driver.

“My girlfriend.”

“What’s her name?”

“McKenna,” he said. Then corrected himself. “Megan.”

“Don’t Reach for Anything”

The focus shifted to the passenger.

“Megan, put your hands out of the window!” an officer shouted.

“What?” she called back, voice high and shaky.

“Both hands. I see both hands. Open the door from the outside with one of your hands.”

“I can’t see,” another officer said softly to his partner. “If you can open the door, step out and face away from us. Keep both hands up.”

The young woman did as she was told, awkwardly pulling the door open and stepping out, hands raised.

“Stop! Stop!” an officer ordered suddenly. “Don’t reach for anything.”

“I’m trying,” she said, panicked, hands hovering mid‑air, body twisting as she tried to follow conflicting instructions.

“Face away from us,” the officer repeated. “Turn around. Walk backwards to the sound of my voice.”

She walked backward, the gravel crunching under her shoes.

“Stop right there,” the officer said. “Three steps to your left. Now keep walking backwards. Stop. Hands on top of your head.”

Within moments, she was handcuffed too.

Her name was Megan Renee Cargala.

She was 23 years old.

Neither she nor the driver yet knew that they were sitting in a murder victim’s vehicle, or that investigators were about to tie them directly to a man’s death.

“Do You Have Any Weapons?”

“Do you have anything illegal on your person?” an officer asked Megan. “Any weapons?”

“No,” she said. “No. Just laundry.”

“Is there anything illegal in the car? Drugs? Weapons?”

“No,” she repeated. “No.”

They patted her down, finding nothing.

Then they searched her purse.

“Hey guys, I have a gun in here,” Megan blurted out suddenly.

The officers froze.

The mood shifted instantly from methodical to deadly serious.

“I’m very unhappy with you,” one officer said, voice tight. “I asked if you had a weapon. You’re lucky you didn’t reach into that purse. You would have gotten shot.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she said quickly.

But the damage was done. Inside her purse, officers found a handgun.

It was loaded.

Nearby, they found ammunition. Two spent shell casings and one live round in her possession. More live rounds in her pocket.

“She’s got a gun in her purse,” one officer told another. “I asked her if she had any weapons—she said no. Gun right in there.”

Was this the gun that killed Devonte Adams?

It wasn’t clear yet. But for investigators, the pieces had suddenly snapped into a sharper outline:

A dead man on Fifth Avenue North.
His stolen Suburban now recovered.
A young woman in the passenger seat with a gun in her purse — and ammunition.
A boyfriend behind the wheel claiming he “bought the car” from a friend.

They had their first real suspects.

Names and Motives

In the days that followed, Minneapolis and St. Paul detectives worked together. They traced the Suburban, confirmed its connection to the homicide, and started pulling threads:

Who was the driver?
Who was the girlfriend?
Where had they been?
What had they done?

The driver was identified as Vernon Sirhy Archie, already on law enforcement’s radar for prior offenses.

The passenger, as already logged, was Megan Renee Cargala.

Ballistics tests soon linked the gun in Megan’s purse to fired rounds connected to multiple incidents. Physical evidence and digital records—GPS traces, phone pings, text logs—put both Megan and Archie in suspicious proximity to the Fifth Avenue crime scene at the relevant time.

Investigators discovered something else too: before Devonte was shot, he had been communicating with a woman on a dating app.

Her profile picture was of a young woman with bright clothes and colorful hair. Her username wasn’t her real name. Her messages promised sex.

The digital breadcrumb trail led straight to Megan.

The First Charge

After the St. Paul stop, Megan was arrested and initially charged with carrying a pistol without a permit, a gross misdemeanor. Under Minnesota law, that alone was serious.

At her first court appearance, she appeared small and frightened, eyes darting across the courtroom. She was released without bail pending further investigation.

That might have been the end of her story—a young woman arrested for a gun infraction, tied to a stolen car, possibly just the girlfriend along for the ride.

But the detectives didn’t stop digging.

They brought her back in, this time not as just a passenger in a stolen Suburban, but as a potential accomplice in a homicide.

They sat her down in a small interrogation room: a table, two chairs, a wall camera, a box of tissues within reach.

“We’re here just to have a conversation,” one of the detectives told her. “You can walk out of here anytime you want.”

She nodded, fidgeting with her hands.

“What did you want to talk about?” she asked quietly.

He gave her a slow, measured look.

“I think there are several things that happened this weekend and leading up to the weekend,” he said. “We know that Vernon and you were involved in a lot of stuff.”

He paused.

“So,” he said, “where do you want to start?”

Meth, Chaos, and a Stolen Car

At first, Megan tried to keep the story small.

“We met up with his buddy to go get a car,” she said. “I didn’t know it was stolen.”

She described hanging around “his sister’s house,” fights breaking out, her trying to break them up and then giving up.

“They fight all the time,” she said. “That’s his family.”

She talked about one incident where, she claimed, Vernon’s relative was driving recklessly, and Vernon fired shots “out the window”—not at anyone, she insisted, just “up in the air.”

Then she admitted something else: she and Vernon had been doing meth.

“A lot of meth is really fatal these days,” she said, stumbling over her words. “We stay up all night and all day. I was probably sleeping, or trying to sleep, or trying to stay awake. I don’t really remember.”

The detectives let her talk, asking her to walk them through “a four‑day rundown” of where they’d been and what they’d done.

In truth, the details blurred. Train rides. St. Paul streets. His sister’s house. People threatening them. A buddy lending them a car she claimed she didn’t know was stolen.

But when the conversation turned toward the morning of May 17th, Megan’s memory sharpened.

Not all at once.

But enough.

“We Were Desperate”

The detectives knew more than she realized.

They had Devonte’s phone records. They had the dating app messages. They had Ring camera footage from houses on Fifth Avenue. They had, crucially, a ballistic link between a gun in her purse and shell casings at the scene.

What they needed was a narrative of intent.

They needed to know why.

Megan’s story, at its core, was simple and devastating: she and Vernon were broke and high.

“Me and Vernon were homeless,” she said at one point. “He didn’t have to be. I told him not to be. I told him there’s no room and I’d figure it out myself. But he said, ‘No, we’re going to figure this out.’”

A friend of Vernon’s, she claimed, had told them how to get “stolen cars” and “do all that stuff.”

“We were desperate,” she said. “We didn’t have nothing. Not even a penny. Nothing to drink, nothing to eat.”

That desperation became the justification—for them—of what came next.

“I went on my phone,” Megan continued, “and there was this guy who was trying to have sex with me for whatever.”

They were on a dating app called Tagged. The man on the other end of the messages was persistent, messaging over and over.

“Vernon was like, ‘This is the one. He probably has a car. He’s going to pull up and then we can just do whatever.’”

“‘Whatever’” would turn out to be a deadly euphemism.

The Setup

The plan, as Megan described it, was both crude and chilling.

She would lure the man using the dating app, promising sex. She would send him an address—a random address on Fifth Avenue North. She would meet him, or at least appear to, and then she and Vernon would take his car.

She said she didn’t know the exact house number when she selected the location, just that she dropped the pin somewhere around Fifth Avenue and a cross street, maybe near Memorial.

“We had the guy pull up,” she said. “I sent him an address. Just random.”

It doesn’t take long for a man who believes he’s about to have sex to drive a few extra miles.

He was Black. He had locs. He drove a Chevy Suburban.

His name was Devonte Jovon Adams.

“We had him come there,” Megan said. “I didn’t think it was going to go the way it did. I just wanted something. I have nothing. My kid, she’s in another state. My family doesn’t care about me.”

The detectives didn’t interrupt. They knew how heavy self‑pity can weigh on a confession. But they didn’t mistake it for remorse—not yet.

“So we had the guy come near,” she continued. “I met him around the corner.”

Vernon waited nearby.

The Confrontation on Fifth Avenue

Megan’s voice got softer when she described what happened next.

“We told him to give us the keys,” she said.

She didn’t say exactly who said it, or how they approached him. The detectives filled in the blanks with existing evidence: the path Devonte’s phone had taken, where he parked, where his body was found.

“And he started running,” Megan said.

That was when Vernon chased him.

“Vernon started running,” she said, “and he ended up shooting him a few times.”

She didn’t say how many, but investigators already knew: three shots, at least, hitting Devonte in the face, neck, chest, and torso.

At 4:45 a.m., on a residential street, under the faint light of streetlamps, a man who thought he was coming to meet a woman was shot trying to run for his life.

After the shots, Megan said, she walked over to where Devonte lay.

“I told him not to move,” she said.

With the smaller gun—the .380—in her hand, she pointed it at him.

“Don’t move,” she said. “I just pointed it at him. I didn’t do nothing to him.”

“What did he say?” the detective asked.

“He said, ‘I won’t move,’” she answered.

She didn’t pull the trigger. That, in her mind, was a key distinction. To the law, it meant something different but still damning: armed participation in a violent crime.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said. “I didn’t. And Vernon didn’t want to either. He told me afterwards he felt bad. He didn’t even want to do it.”

But the reality was this: Devonte was choking on his own blood in the street.

“I saw him choking,” she said. “At that point I knew we’d f–ed up bad. I told [Vernon] there was Ring cameras in the area. I knew it was a bad idea.”

By then, it was too late.

They took his keys.

They took his car.

They left him to die in front of a stranger’s house.

The Aftermath

“Where did you go after?” the detective asked.

“We went to St. Paul,” Megan said. “I think.”

Did you look online afterwards? he wanted to know. See if anyone reported a shooting?

“Yes,” she admitted. “I was looking at the police scanner. Looking at the news. Looking at all of it. We were both terrified of what happened.”

They didn’t find anything at first.

That, she said, scared her more.

“I figured if he didn’t go to the hospital or anything,” she said, “he was probably looking for us.”

In reality, Devonte was beyond searching for anyone.

The real search was coming from the other direction: detectives following the trail from Fifth Avenue to St. Paul, from a dead body to a stolen Suburban, from a stolen Suburban to a young woman and her gun.

Megan claimed she had tried to stop it, that she had begged Vernon to abandon the plan.

“I told him before it even happened, we should just stop,” she said. “We should give up and go. I just didn’t care that we didn’t have anything at that point. I knew something bad was going to happen.”

But when it came down to it, she didn’t walk away.

She lured Devonte in.

She was there when he was shot.

She stood over him with a gun and told him not to move while they robbed him.

She left in his car.

Whatever fear, guilt, or regret came later couldn’t erase those facts.

The Guns in the Purse

The detectives turned the conversation back to the traffic stop.

Why, they asked, had she taken the guns from the floor and put them in her purse when they were pulled over in St. Paul?

“They were in the middle of the seat,” she said. “I just grabbed them because I didn’t want him to go down for anything more than he was already going to go down for.”

She knew, she admitted, as soon as the squad lights flashed, that the car was stolen.

“At that moment, I knew I had to do something,” she said. “So I picked them up. Put them in my stuff.”

She tried to frame it as an act of loyalty.

He was there for me when nobody else was, she said.

The detectives saw something else: a conscious decision to obstruct, to take on criminal liability for him—a pattern that likely started long before this case.

They asked if the officers who stopped them had suspected her of firing shots.

“No,” she said. “They didn’t even ask if I fired them. They were just asking about him.”

That would change.

Because ballistics would soon show that the gun in her purse, and the ammunition in their pockets, connected not just to shots fired in a family dispute, but to the bullets that killed Devonte.

“You Can’t Avoid This”

At one point, overwhelmed, Megan said she didn’t want to talk anymore.

“I think that’s natural,” the detective replied. “It’s very difficult to talk about. But we just don’t want to see you go down for something someone else did.”

He wasn’t lying—but he also wasn’t letting her off the hook.

“You were arrested with a firearm linked to what happened,” he reminded her. “That puts you in a defect. Ring cameras are everywhere now. People can distinguish you. Especially bright colors on your shorts.”

He gave her a choice: talk now or lose the chance to explain her role.

“This is your opportunity,” he said. “Your last chance to talk to us.”

“What do you want to know?” she finally asked.

“We want to know what happened that morning,” he said.

“It wasn’t that day,” she said, confused, her memory tangled from drug use and fear.

He narrowed the window.

“Friday morning,” he said. “The 17th. 3 days before you got arrested. Another vehicle. Another person.”

Piece by piece, she laid it out.

And in doing so, she placed herself not just at the scene of the robbery, but inside the plan that put Devonte in that street at that time.

“In all honesty,” he told her, “you were there. You can’t avoid this.”

She nodded.

“I know,” she said.

A Detective’s Advice—and a Life Already Off Track

By the end of the interview, Megan seemed exhausted.

She clung to one concern: Vernon.

“I’m just worried about him,” she said. “He was there for me when nobody else was.”

“How old are you?” the detective asked.

“23.”

He told her he was nearly twice her age, that he’d watched this pattern play out many times: young women tethered to violent men, convinced that loyalty outweighed survival.

“There are a lot of loves in life,” he said. “Some are going to pass, some are going to go. The bad things you have right now, they’re going to be gone too. Life is going to keep moving forward.”

He was blunt about where that life was heading if she stayed on the same path:

Drugs.
Violent partners.
Armed robberies spiraling into murder.
Prison—or a grave.

“Stay off the drugs,” he told her. “Take care of yourself.”

It was hard to imagine her actually doing that, given where she sat and what she’d just admitted.

Still, his words underscored something important: Megan wasn’t a monster. She was a deeply damaged young woman, traumatized, addicted, often homeless, whose choices had nonetheless helped kill a man who had done nothing but show up where she told him to.

The system would reflect that duality in its response.

Sentencing: Two Lives, Two Paths

The legal process that followed was complex, but its outcomes were stark.

Vernon Sirhy Archie was charged with murder.

Prosecutors pursued him aggressively.

At trial, Megan’s testimony was central. In exchange for her cooperation—and a guilty plea to a reduced charge—her murder charge was dismissed.

She pleaded guilty to first‑degree aggravated robbery.

The judge, weighing her youth, addiction, and role against the severity of the crime, sentenced her to nearly 5 years in prison.

It was harsh enough to reflect the seriousness of what she’d done, lenient enough to recognize that she hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Vernon, on the other hand, faced the full weight of the law.

He was convicted of two counts of second‑degree murder—charges that, in Minnesota, carry significant penalties even absent premeditation.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

For Devonte’s family, no sentence could feel adequate. A son, brother, friend, and father—if he had children—had been lured and killed so two people could drive away in his car.

Devonte Adams: The Man Behind the Headlines

True‑crime stories often focus on killers and their motives.

But at the center of this case was a man who hadn’t done anything wrong.

Devonte Jovon Adams was 28 years old.

He had friends who liked to joke around with him. He had family who worried when he didn’t answer his phone. He had flaws, no doubt. He may have made bad choices in his dating life—we all do.

But whatever he thought he was driving to that night, he did not drive there expecting to die.

His last words, according to Megan, were, “I won’t move.”

He was complying, trying not to provoke more violence, bleeding on the street.

His life was reduced, in news stories, to a victim label: “man killed in carjacking.” But his death carried a heavy weight—not only for those who loved him, but also for a city already raw from too many shootings, too many Black men dying too young on too many streets that looked like any other.

A Deadly Intersection: Desperation, Drugs, and Digital Access

What made this case especially chilling was how ordinary some parts of it were.

A dating app.

A persistent stranger messaging late at night.

A pin dropped on a map.

Most people reading this have experienced some version of that—if not personally, then in the life of a friend. The idea that a message promising sex could mask a death trap is not new; police warn frequently about robbery setups via apps and social media.

What stood out here was the combination of factors:

Two people so desperate and addicted that they were willing to plan a violent crime.
A society where guns were easily accessible to them.
A digital ecosystem that makes it frictionless to connect with strangers, who know nothing about the danger waiting for them.
A victim who trusted, for just long enough, that the person messaging him was who she claimed to be.

Megan didn’t act alone. Vernon didn’t act alone. They were both part of a plan.

But the plan needed one more ingredient: someone like Devonte, willing to believe in a simple story—come here, meet me, you’ll get what you want.

He did.

He got three bullets instead.

What This Case Exposed

In the end, the case of Minneapolis v. Archie & Cargala revealed a deadly plot with a short, brutal arc:

Desperation and addiction drive two young people to consider extreme measures.
A friend’s advice introduces them to car theft and “how to get stolen cars.”
A dating app becomes the bait, with sex as the lure.
A random address on Fifth Avenue North becomes the stage.
A man shows up, alone in his Chevy Suburban.
He runs when he realizes something’s wrong.
He’s shot in the face, neck, chest, and torso.
He’s ordered not to move at gunpoint while his attackers take his keys.
They flee in his car.
Three days later, they’re pulled over in St. Paul.
A gun in a purse and shell casings in a pocket connect them to the scene.
Interrogations bring the story into focus.
Plea deals and testimony seal Vernon’s fate.
Sentences are handed down.
Another name is added to the list of young men killed by firearms in the Twin Cities.

Every step along that chain could have broken differently.

They could have turned down the “buddy’s” advice.
They could have refused to use a stranger as a mark.
They could have walked away when Devonte ran.
Vernon could have fired into the air.
Megan could have left the guns on the floor.

None of that happened.

Instead, a plan hatched in a fog of meth and misery turned into a very real, very final tragedy.

The Lessons Left Behind

There are a few easy narratives you could cling to here.

You could say: “Don’t meet strangers from dating apps in unfamiliar places.” That’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete.

You could say: “Stay away from people like Vernon and Megan.” Also not wrong. Also incomplete.

You could say: “The system worked—killers caught, justice served.” On paper, yes. But the system only steps in after the bullets fly.

The more uncomfortable truth is that cases like this exist where multiple failures converge:

A social safety net that doesn’t catch people like Megan before they’re sleeping on trains and using meth to stay awake.
A culture of violence that normalizes guns as tools for problem‑solving.
A digital ecosystem that makes luring strangers both easy and anonymous.
A justice system that is reactive by design, not preventative.

And yet, inside all that, you still find individual choices.

Megan made choices. Vernon made choices. Devonte made a choice too.

Their choices intersected in the worst way possible on Fifth Avenue North.

Epilogue: A Street, A Memory, A Question

Fifth Avenue North doesn’t look any different now.

Cars still park along the curb. Kids still ride bikes when the weather allows. Neighbors still take out their trash on the same night each week.

But for the people who heard those three shots, who stepped outside and saw Devonte on the ground, the street is not just a place they live.

It’s a place where, for a brief, violent moment, desperation and cruelty converged on a stranger’s body.

For detectives like the ones who interviewed Megan, this case will fold into a larger pattern. Another file. Another story they tell younger officers when they talk about the realities of robbery setups and gun crime.

For Devonte’s family, it will never be a “case.” It will be a chair that’s empty at holidays. A voice that goes silent. A wound that time may dull but never truly heals.

For Megan, those five years in prison may be long enough for her to get clean, to think, to reckon with the weight of being part of someone’s last moments.

For Vernon, thirty years is almost an entire lifetime of mornings, each one beginning inside walls he’ll never be able to walk out of freely until he’s middle‑aged, if then.

And for us, reading this story from the distance of screens and safe rooms, the question remains:

What do we do with stories like this?

Do we treat them as entertainment? As cautionary tales? As evidence of how broken people can become when systems and choices collide?

Or do we take them as quiet warnings about the thin line between the world we assume we live in—and the one we actually do?

Because the truth is simple.

Devonte Adams got into his truck and drove to meet someone who wasn’t who she claimed to be.

He trusted a lie sent through a glowing screen.

And on a quiet street before dawn, three gunshots turned that lie into the last thing he ever heard.