State of Iowa v. Renard Winfield Jr.

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
_______________

No. 25-0212
Filed June 10, 2026
_______________

State of Iowa,
Plaintiff–Appellee,
v.
Renard Winfield Jr.,
Defendant–Appellant.
_______________

Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Johnson County,
The Honorable Jason D. Besler, Judge.
_______________

AFFIRMED
_______________

Martha J. Lucey, State Appellate Defender, and Shellie L. Knipfer,
Assistant Appellate Defender, attorneys for appellant.

Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and David Banta, Assistant Attorney
General, attorneys for appellee.
_______________

Considered without oral argument
by Ahlers, P.J., Langholz, J., and Telleen, S.J.
Opinion by Telleen, S.J.

1
TELLEEN, Senior Judge.

Renard Winfield Jr. appeals his conviction for first-degree murder,
arguing the State failed to present sufficient evidence to support a finding that
he was the shooter. Agreeing that sufficient evidence proved Winfield’s
identity, we affirm his conviction.

BACKGROUND FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS
Winfield was shot in the leg in 2020. Winfield’s former girlfriend
suspected Tommy Curry had shot Winfield and reported that suspicion to
the police. The responding officer testified that a neighbor reported seeing a
male matching Curry’s description “in the yard” at the time of the shooting.
Unable to gather any further information—due in part to Winfield’s lack of
cooperation in the investigation—police felt they lacked enough evidence to
bring charges against Curry.

The day after being shot, Winfield sent an email to a former girlfriend
in which he warned “somebody gots to go n it won’t be me” while discussing
Curry. Winfield later sent Curry’s picture to a person known as “T Blicky”
and described Curry as the person who shot him. Winfield also noted that he
knew Curry had a Plenty of Fish (POF) online dating account. Winfield then
explained to T Blicky that he had created a fake POF account to pose as a
woman named “Lena” in an effort to reach out to Curry. Investigators later
confirmed that the email address associated with “Lena’s” POF account was
the same email address tied to the iCloud account on Winfield’s iPhone.
Winfield first began messaging Curry through the fake account in January
2021.

After a hiatus in text exchanges, Curry contacted the “Lena” account
again in April. Over the course of several days, Curry and Winfield—who

2
was posing as “Lena”—arranged for a meeting time and place. On April 28,
they settled on meeting at a residential building in “the quarters” in Iowa
City. Curry arrived at the agreed-upon location in his vehicle, and “Lena”
was not present. Curry texted “Lena” to ask when she would arrive.
Moments later, a resident reported that “[r]oughly ten [to] fifteen” shots in
“quick succession” sounded. That resident looked outside and saw a white
SUV leaving the parking lot from where she heard the shots. The resident’s
mother called 911 and relayed that information to dispatch. Another witness
testified that he saw a masked shooter stand next to Curry’s vehicle and fire
shots into the vehicle with a handgun.

Multiple shots hit Curry while he was still waiting in his vehicle.
According to the medical examiner, one shot “entered the chest cavity,
involved the left lung, involved the heart, including one of the coronary
arteries” and “resulted in massive hemorrhage” which “likely was the
mechanism of death.”

Fifteen shell casings were recovered from the scene, and Curry was
found by police with no pulse. Of those casings, five possessed a distinctive
blue ring around the primer and were Federal-branded, nine-millimeter
casings. Winfield had bought a box of blue-ringed, Federal-branded, nine-
millimeter bullets from an Iowa City sporting goods store shortly before the
date of the shooting. Winfield recorded himself loading a handgun with blue-
ringed bullets. He also recorded himself driving a white Dodge Journey while
holding a handgun, and security cameras recorded him in a white SUV the
day before the shooting. Additionally, traffic and surveillance cameras
recorded Winfield driving a white SUV after the shooting. Police cross-
referenced the footage locations with the GPS data from Winfield’s phone to
create a map of his escape route following the shooting. Police used those

3
recordings to identify the SUV as a Dodge Journey registered to Winfield’s
mother. Data from Winfield’s phone also showed that he was continuously
searching for news about the shooting, including searches for “2400 block
lakeside drive,” “tommy curry shooting,” “tommy curry was shot how many
times,” and multiple instances of “iowa city news shooting.”

After obtaining a search warrant for Winfield’s mother’s home in
Gary, Indiana, police recovered the box of Federal ammunition that Winfield
had purchased. The twenty-round box was missing exactly five rounds—the
same number of Federal, blue-ringed rounds used in the shooting. The
Dodge Journey contained paperwork with Winfield’s name on it. Winfield
told police he had not been to Iowa City in April and had never driven the
Dodge Journey to Iowa City.

The State charged Winfield with first-degree murder in May 2021. A
jury convicted him as charged. Winfield was sentenced to life imprisonment
with no possibility of parole. He now appeals his conviction, arguing that
insufficient evidence supports the finding that he was the person who shot
Curry.

STANDARD OF REVIEW
We review challenges to the sufficiency of evidence for correction of
legal error. Iowa R. App. 6.907; State v. Sanford, 814 N.W.2d 611, 615
(Iowa 2012).

DISCUSSION
The jury was instructed that to convict Winfield of first-degree
murder, the State had prove the following:
1. On or about the 28th day of April 2021, [Winfield] shot Tommy Curry.

4
2. Tommy Curry died as a result of being shot.

3. [Winfield] acted with malice aforethought.

4. [Winfield] acted willfully, deliberately, premeditatedly and with a
specific intent to kill Tommy Curry.

5. [Winfield] did not act with justification.

Winfield argues the State presented insufficient evidence identifying
him as the person who shot Curry. He contends that only circumstantial
evidence supports his conviction and that nobody could have identified him
as the shooter since the shooter was wearing a mask. But “circumstantial and
direct evidence are equally probative.” Godfrey v. State, 962 N.W.2d 84, 102
(Iowa 2021) (cleaned up). And we are unmoved by Winfield’s suggestion that
he can escape any opportunity for positive identification by wearing a mask.
The circumstantial evidence of his identification as the shooter was extensive
and compelling. The State presented evidence that Winfield planned a
catfishing scheme through the POF account to lure Curry to a specific
location. Curry was murdered minutes after arriving at that agreed-upon
location. GPS, surveillance, and traffic data all corroborated Winfield’s
departure from the scene of the murder.

Winfield argues a witness’s inability to identify his Dodge Journey
correctly—initially claiming it was a white Chevy Malibu—shows her
account cannot be relied upon. But the witness confidently testified that the
vehicle was “a bigger car. It wasn’t like a sedan. And it was white.” The
possibility that the witness does not possess an encyclopedic knowledge of
specific vehicle makes and models does not prevent a reasonable factfinder
from crediting her consistent and overarching testimony that she saw a larger
white vehicle fleeing the scene of the murder. Such credibility determinations

5
are fully within the factfinder’s discretion. See Tim O’Neill Chevrolet, Inc. v.
Forristall, 551 N.W.2d 611, 614 (Iowa 1996).

Winfield also takes issue with individual frames of surveillance and
traffic camera footage that law enforcement recovered. But the State did not
unilaterally rely on any individual frame of video to prove Winfield’s escape.
Rather, it used a combination of multiple camera videos and GPS data to map
the path of Winfield’s escape. Together, this evidence is extremely
compelling. Law enforcement used that confluence of data to specifically
identify his mother’s Indiana-registered vehicle and tie that same vehicle to
the scene of the murder.

Winfield also purchased the same ammunition that was used in the
murder, and his box of purchased ammunition was missing the exact number
of blue-ringed, Federal-branded, nine-millimeter rounds used in the murder.
He repeatedly lied to police and engaged in internet searches for changing
SIM cards and transferring data out of his iPhone before he was contacted by
law enforcement. And the State showed that Winfield believed Curry to be
the person who had previously shot him.

Collectively, the State presented sufficient evidence for the jury to
determine that Winfield was the person who shot and killed Curry. We affirm.

AFFIRMED.

6