RICHMOND, Va. — When Nick Clavier was shot and killed driving his children on a fishing trip in October 2015, Chesterfield Police initially determined Clavier had unintentionally shot himself.
A ruling Clavier’s widow Melody refused to believe.
“It’s just so important for the world to know that he would have never been capable of putting his children in harm’s way,” she said.
One reason Melody was so adamant Nick did not kill himself was the fact her daughter, who was in the car at the time, said someone in another car shot her dad.
“I heard a loud noise,” daughter Mikayla, who was in the passenger seat at the time, said. “I looked over and saw my dad, he was bleeding and blood was going everywhere.”
Despite Mikayla’s eyewitness account, the ruling of Clavier’s death did not change.
When a December 2016 ballistics test came back on the bullet recovered from Nick’s brain, the markings showed the bullet could not have been fired from the .380 pistol recovered from Nick’s vehicle.
Still, no change in the death investigation.
But soon after CBS 6 Problem Solver Laura French interviewed the family in May 2017, police changed the status of Nick’s case from cleared to pending.
In December 2017, Chesterfield Police went back to the field where Clavier died and spent hours digging for clues.
Then in May 2018, police officially classified Clavier’s death as a homicide.
In September 2018, nearly three years after the Chesterfield father was shot and killed, police said they knew who murdered him.
Chesterfield Police detectives and federal investigators told French an investigation identified Jerquell Cheatham as the man who shot Clavier.
“Somebody in that vehicle pointed their gun outside the vehicle, fired one round which struck either Nick’s vehicle or the weather stripping around his window causing the bullet to tumble striking him in the head killing him,” Chesterfield Police Captain Jay Thornton said.
“He engaged in some road rage activity,” Thornton said of Clavier prior to his death. “Whether he was the instigator of that or the reciprocator we don’t know.”
How did this all happen? That’s the question explored in a Problem Solvers True Crime Documentary titled: ‘Didn’t Add Up.’
