How an amputee cornhole pro's friendship unraveled into a killing

playFormer pro cornhole player now faces murder charge (2:58)Dayton Webber once drew national attention as a quadruple amputee competing in professional cornhole. Now, he faces a murder charge. ESPN's Tom Schad reports. (2:58) LA PLATA, Md. -- Brad Wells spent the last moments of his life in the passenger seat of a white Tesla Model X, winding down a two-lane road in southern Maryland under the glow of a crescent moon. The driver, Dayton Webber, was something of a local celebrity -- a quadruple amputee who went on to become a professional cornhole player. To Wells, though, he had been a friend. They grew up riding dirt bikes or ATVs at the same local motocross track. They both owned and loved guns. According to people who know them, they had been friends for a decade, if not longer. On this mild Sunday night, they had driven north to a chain steakhouse in a neighboring town, where a mutual acquaintance named Gary Gray was wrapping up his shift at work. The restaurant closed at 10 p.m., and Gray and one of his coworkers hopped in the back seat. Webber steered the Tesla back south. As they reached the outskirts of La Plata, Maryland, Webber and Wells got into what police described as a heated argument over "drugs, guns and a woman." A Maryland prosecutor said in court that Webber believed someone had stolen weapons from his house and was angry that Wells was still associating with the supposed thief. Gray described the argument to a British tabloid as being about "high school BS." Whatever the specifics, there is little disagreement about what happened next: Somewhere along Radio Station Road, the argument boiled over. Webber, who was still driving, produced a gun. Authorities say he fired two shots into Wells' head, leaving a bullet hole in a car window and blood on the passenger's seat. In the chaotic minutes that followed, Webber pulled over and asked Gray and his coworker to help get Wells' body out of the car, according to a police report. The passengers said they refused and fled. Webber kept driving. A few hours later, a resident who lives about 10 miles away noticed Wells' body in their front yard. Police found Webber at an emergency room in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he had stopped to receive medical treatment and called his lawyer. His Tesla -- and a handgun matching the description of the murder weapon -- was located at the gas station next door. The 27-year-old was indicted on charges that include first-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. His attorneys argued that he acted in self-defense. "Both parties agree that Dayton Webber shot Bradrick Wells," state prosecutor Karen Piper Mitchell said in a recent news conference. "As to the why, that's where we're in dispute." In the weeks after the March 22 killing, the case generated sensationalized headlines and went viral on social media, with crude jokes about Webber's disability -- and old clips of him firing weapons -- helping to fuel the story's spread. Many people simply wondered how a quadruple amputee could shoot a gun while driving. But now, more than a month later, those social media quips have subsided. What's left is a tragic reality -- and two people whose complicated lives are now coming into sharper focus. There's Webber, a once-inspirational figure now awaiting trial, as new slivers of his past come to light. And there's Wells, a gearhead and recent father whose death, in the eyes of friends and family members, is being overshadowed by the onetime friend who pulled the trigger. "Dayton used to be [Wells'] best friend. So just for any of this to be the way it is, [it's] crazy to me," said Ronell Bradshaw, who said he had known Wells since they were in middle school. "It's like, how do you kill your best friend, you know?" Dayton Webber, a quadruple amputee and former professional cornhole player, is accused of killing a friend after an argument. His attorneys say he acted in self-defense. ESPNWEBBER'S JOURNEY TO professional cornhole is the quintessential underdog story -- an uphill climb against seemingly insurmountable odds. In 2023, it garnered national media attention from both ESPN and NBC's "Today." And the story of how he lost his limbs laid the foundation for his inspirational persona. Webber was just 10 months old when he spiked a 105-degree fever and his mother, Natalie, first took him to see a doctor, according to a copy of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by the Webber family against the medical team responsible for his initial care. When the symptoms persisted over the course of the day, then worsened, Webber was put on an emergency flight to Children's National Hospital. Doctors in Washington gave Webber an aggressive course of antibiotics, but it couldn't stop the infection surging through his body. He contracted meningitis and went into sepsis. A few weeks before his first birthday, doctors amputated all four of his limbs. The lawsuit describes it as "a last ditch ef

How an amputee cornhole pro's friendship unraveled into a killing

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