Houston was rocked by a deadly drama that unfolded in a storage unit off the Eastex Freeway in early November, and now police say it all traces back to a cocaine deal gone terribly wrong.

The victim, 33-year-old Sherry Dawson, met a violent end on November 5, allegedly gunned down after her partner’s underworld dealings soured over a lost drug fortune.

The prime suspect? Kip Stitts, a Detroit native with ties to Dawson’s circle, who now faces a murder charge, though he remains nowhere to be found. Court records reveal Stitts once worked alongside Dawson’s common-law husband, a self-confessed player in Houston’s drug trafficking scene.

Surveillance footage from that fateful morning paints a chilling picture: Dawson drives into the storage facility, a pickup trails close behind. Moments later, a scuffle breaks out; she’s seen collapsing after an apparent struggle, only to be left as the assailant makes a swift getaway. Authorities believe this was far more than a random attack.

Investigators uncovered that a month before the shooting, Dawson’s partner accepted $125,000 from Stitts for a promised cocaine shipment—drugs that, according to police, never actually changed hands. The plot thickened when Dawson’s husband admitted to introducing Stitts to his supplier, only to cook up a plan with the supplier to double-cross Stitts when he announced intentions to rob them.

Trouble began brewing weeks prior to Dawson’s death, with her husband catching wind that an enraged Stitts was hunting him down, court records say. By the evening of November 5, Stitts was already on the radar—in fact, police in Atascocita stopped a car registered to him just hours after the murder, but the wanted man was nowhere in sight. The following day, his cellphone was tracked hundreds of miles away in Detroit.