The Takeoff Murder Trial Starts Next Month: Everything You Need to Know Before November 9

It’s been almost four years. Four years since Takeoff was shot and killed outside a bowling alley in downtown Houston, and the man charged with his murder has still never stood trial. That changes next month.

Jury selection is set for November 5, 2026, and the trial itself is scheduled to begin November 9 in Harris County, Texas. This is the first firm trial date the case has ever had. So before the courtroom doors open and the headlines start flying, let’s lay the whole thing out — who Takeoff was, what happened that night, who got charged, what the defense is saying, and what to watch for when this finally goes before a jury.

Who Takeoff was

Kirsnick Khari Ball — Takeoff — was 28 years old, the youngest member of Migos, and by most accounts the quietest one. He was Quavo’s nephew, raised in the same Lawrenceville, Georgia household as Quavo and Offset, and the group formed back in 2008 before breaking through with “Versace” in 2013 and then running the late 2010s with Culture and Culture II.

Here’s the thing people who really knew the music always said: Takeoff might have been the best rapper in the group. Quavo said it himself. Takeoff wasn’t the loudest personality — he let the verses do the talking. His solo album The Last Rocket dropped in 2018, and his last release before his death was Only Built for Infinity Links, the October 2022 project with Quavo as the duo Unc & Phew. That came out just weeks before he was killed.

By 2022, Migos as a trio had already fractured — Takeoff and Quavo were moving as a duo while Offset pursued solo work. That context matters, because of who was and wasn’t in Houston that night.

The night it happened: November 1, 2022

Around 2:30 in the morning on Tuesday, November 1, 2022, a private after-hours party was winding down at 810 Billiards & Bowling, at 1201 San Jacinto in downtown Houston. The party was hosted by J. Prince Jr., son of Rap-A-Lot Records founder J. Prince. Somewhere between 40 and 50 people were there.

There was a dice game. Police later called it “lucrative.” Quavo was in the game. Takeoff was not.

When the night ended, the crowd moved outside toward the front doors of the building, and an argument broke out — tied to the dice game. Then gunfire erupted. Video from the scene shows Quavo walking away moments before the shots started.

Takeoff was hit multiple times. The Harris County medical examiner ruled the cause of death “penetrating gunshot wounds of head and torso into arm” — homicide. He died at the scene. He was 28.

And I need to be very clear about this part, because Houston’s police chief said it himself: Takeoff was unarmed, he wasn’t involved in the dice game, and he wasn’t involved in the argument. Chief Troy Finner called him an innocent bystander, “definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time,” with no reason to believe he was involved in anything criminal. His own label initially put out a statement calling it a “stray bullet.” The autopsy told a different story — he was struck more than once.

Two other people were wounded that night: Joshua “Wash” Washington, 23, who worked as Quavo’s assistant, and a 24-year-old woman whose name was never publicly released. Both survived with non-life-threatening injuries. Quavo was there and unhurt. Offset was not there at all.

A lot of the 30-plus people outside scattered when the shooting started. That matters for what comes next — witnesses ran.

The investigation and the arrest

Houston police said from early on that at least two people fired guns that night. But when it came to whose bullets hit Takeoff, investigators pointed at one man.

On December 1, 2022 — exactly one month after the killing — police arrested 33-year-old Patrick Xavier Clark, a Houston DJ who goes by DJ Pat, and charged him with murder. At the press conference the next day, HPD homicide Sgt. Michael Burrow called Clark “the lethal shooter,” saying the determination came from video footage and ballistics. An investigation summary later reported that Clark’s rounds were the only ones to strike Takeoff, even though others were shooting too.

The evidence prosecutors have talked about publicly: surveillance video showing Clark pointing and firing a gun toward the group, and Clark’s fingerprints recovered from a wine bottle left at the scene.

Two weeks before Clark’s arrest, on November 22, police had arrested a second man — 22-year-old Cameron Joshua — but on weapons charges, not murder. Prosecutors said they did not believe Joshua fired a weapon at all; he was charged because he was a felon in possession of a gun at the scene. His attorney said flatly: “Cameron Joshua did not shoot Takeoff.” What ultimately happened with Joshua’s weapons case was never clearly reported.

No one else has ever been arrested or charged.

The man accused — and what his lawyers say

Patrick Xavier Clark pleaded not guilty. From the very beginning, his defense has been: self-defense. His attorney said after the December 2022 bond hearing that Clark would have “a valid and meritorious claim for self-defense” — essentially that he fired only after someone shot at him first. Police, on the other hand, have said Clark fired the first shot.

That bond hearing, by the way, was revealing. Prosecutors laid out flight-risk evidence: they said Clark had searched online for fake plane tickets, sought an expedited passport with an itinerary for an “imminent” flight to Mexico, looked up news coverage about whether he was a suspect, and was arrested the day he received the passport — with a large amount of cash on him. His bond started at $2 million. The defense asked for it to be cut to $100,000. The judge said no to that, but it was eventually reduced to $1 million, and Clark walked out of the Harris County Jail in January 2023 under house arrest with a GPS monitor and a list of conditions.

In 2026, with the trial approaching, his attorney added a new wrinkle: questioning whether prosecutors can say “with any degree of certainty” that it was Clark’s shot that took Takeoff’s life, and arguing Clark wasn’t part of the initial dispute at all — that he was trying to leave when the shooting began.

A grand jury indicted Clark for murder on May 25, 2023. And then… mostly silence, for years.

The long, strange road to trial

This is the part that still doesn’t have a clean explanation. Here’s the timeline:

• November 1, 2022 — the shooting.
• November 22, 2022 — Cameron Joshua arrested on weapons charges.
• December 1, 2022 — Patrick Clark arrested and charged with murder.
• December 15, 2022 — bond hearing; flight-risk evidence aired; self-defense previewed.
• January 2023 — bond reduced to $1 million; Clark released under house arrest.
• May 25, 2023 — grand jury indicts Clark for murder.
• 2024 — the criminal case proceeds mostly out of public view.
• December 10, 2025 — Clark appears in court; hearing continued.
• January 8, 2026 — pretrial conference; the defense confirms no plea deals are on the table and the case is headed to a jury.
• February 10, 2026 — the big one: a pretrial hearing finally sets a trial date. Jury selection November 5, 2026. Trial November 9, 2026.
• September 14, 2026 — Clark’s defense files a motion asking for an independent expert to examine the bullets and evidence held by Houston police.

No earlier trial date was ever set, and no official reason for the nearly four-year gap has ever been published. Cases get delayed — motions, evidence fights, crowded dockets — but four years for a case this high-profile, with the defendant out on bond the whole time, is striking. If convicted of murder in Texas, Clark faces 5 to 99 years or life.

What the public docket does confirm: the case is cause number 1797220 in Harris County’s 232nd Criminal District Court, filed December 2, 2022, and still listed as active.

One honest note: the name of the judge who will preside over the trial hasn’t been clearly identified in public reporting. The bond hearing back in 2022 was before Judge Josh Hill, but that’s the only judge named on the record so far.

What to watch when the trial starts

If you’re following this trial, here are the questions that will decide it:

The ballistics. This is everything. The state’s case rests on video and ballistics tying the fatal shots to Clark’s gun — and the defense is already attacking that, asking for its own expert to examine the bullets and questioning whether anyone can say for certain whose round killed Takeoff. Expect a battle of forensic experts.

Self-defense vs. who shot first. The defense says Clark fired only after being shot at. Police say he fired first. With at least two shooters and a chaotic scene outside a club at 2:30 in the morning, reconstructing the sequence is going to be the whole trial.

The witnesses. Forty to fifty people were at that party. Dozens were outside when the shooting started, and many ran. Who actually testifies — and what they say after four years — could make or break this.

The video. Prosecutors say surveillance footage shows Clark pointing and firing. The defense will pick that footage apart frame by frame. In 2026, video cuts both ways.

The dice game. The argument that started it all involved Quavo and a “lucrative” dice game — but police never publicly identified who Quavo was arguing with or what was at stake. Whether the state even needs that story, or the defense uses its murkiness, is an open question.

The other courtroom: his mother’s lawsuit

While the criminal case crawled, Takeoff’s mother Titania Davenport opened a second front. In June 2023 she filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the owners and operators of the venue — 810 Houston LLC and several property companies — arguing the place had basically no security despite hosting an after-hours celebrity gathering: no screening, no after-hours controls, nothing. She listed 18 examples of negligence and sought at least $1 million.

The venue companies fought back hard. In March 2024 filings, one defendant argued Takeoff failed “to exercise ordinary care for his own safety,” and another blamed “unknown criminals” involved in “unlawful gambling.” Read that again — the building’s owners pointing at a dice game to dodge responsibility for a man shot dead outside their doors.

That lawsuit is over now. It was confidentially settled, reported in June 2026. But the money fight isn’t: Davenport and Takeoff’s father Kenneth Ball are now disputing how the settlement gets split. She says she raised Takeoff as a single mother with negligible help from him and wants a Georgia probate court to decide; he says he’s entitled to a share and wants Texas to decide. The amount was never disclosed, and as far as public reporting goes, a judge still hasn’t ruled.

What he left behind

Takeoff’s Celebration of Life was held November 11, 2022, at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena — Justin Bieber, Chlöe Bailey, Yolanda Adams performed; Drake, Offset, and Quavo spoke; Atlanta’s mayor presented the city’s highest honor, the Phoenix Award.

Quavo turned the grief into work. The Rocket Foundation, which he started weeks after the killing, has become a real force in gun-violence prevention — meetings with Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House, the Rocket Summit on what would have been Takeoff’s 30th birthday, a therapy fund for shooting victims. Quavo was named Humanitarian of the Year at Variety’s Hitmakers brunch in 2024.

The music kept coming too: Quavo’s “Without You,” performed at the Grammys In Memoriam holding Takeoff’s chain in the air. The Rocket Power album with posthumous Takeoff verses. And in June 2023, Quavo and Offset shared a stage for the first time since the death — a surprise BET Awards tribute that ended years of public distance between them.

The bottom line

On November 9, 2026, nearly four years after Takeoff was killed standing outside a Houston bowling alley — unarmed, uninvolved, 28 years old — a jury will finally hear this case. The state says Patrick Xavier Clark fired the fatal shots. Clark says he was defending himself. The ballistics, the video, and the witnesses who didn’t run will decide who’s telling the truth.

I’ll be watching. And when there’s a verdict, you’ll read about it here.