Man sentenced for body dumping after night in South End. Body still missing.
There’s been no funeral, no autopsy. But on Thursday a man was sentenced for concealing Andy Tench’s death — and stealing his identity.
D’Shaun Robinson, 26, told police he threw Tench’s unconscious body in a dumpster after meeting him at a Charlotte bar last year.
But authorities never found his body.
The landfill that dumpster would have been unloaded into is too big to search, police have said.
Tench’s family has been reeling with grief — and the thought that the 31-year-old was “buried under 20 feet of Charlotte’s trash” — since Tench went missing on March 25, 2024. And their journey through Mecklenburg County Superior Court jostled them more.
Tench went missing after meeting man in South End bar
Robinson stole Tench’s wallet before tossing him, according to police reports. Then he stole Tench’s car and went on a shopping spree at Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target.
Surveillance footage showed Robinson using Tench’s credit card and driving Tench’s 2010 Hyundai Elantra.
When police followed Tench’s phone to Robinson’s home on April 11, 2024, he told them he and Tench left Bar 316, a now-closed LGBTQ+ bar in South End, to have sex — during which Tench died.
Robinson told police he “panicked” and threw Tench’s body in a dumpster behind a Charlotte-area hotel, about a 15-minute drive away.
Robinson was under the influence, said his attorney, Adam Hauser, “when he made that poor decision.”
In April 2024, Robinson was charged with concealing or failing to report a death, identity theft, financial card theft and financial card fraud.
Prosecutors in Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather’s office twice proposed plea deals that dropped several charges and combined the concealment of death and identity theft charges with an unrelated second-degree burglary charge from a previous case. That plea deal carried a minimum sentencing of 17 months in jail.
“You’re being offered a deal with minimal time and we are supposed to call this justice?” Natasha Newman, Tench’s sister, said in court in April. “What you’ve done is not OK, and a little bit of jail time will not be enough.”
In a statement to The Charlotte Observer on Thursday, Merriweather’s spokesperson Mike Stolp said: “The goal of all plea agreements is to reach a just and fair result, consistent with the available evidence, for victims as well as our community. In this instance, an open plea helped to serve that goal.”
In an “open plea,” there was no plea deal. Instead, Robinson’s sentencing was “at the discretion of the court” and determined by Mecklenburg Superior Court Judge Matthew Osman, according to court documents.
According to court records, Robinson will serve 13 to 25 months for a second-degree burglary charge and an additional 17 to 30 months for stealing Tench’s identity and failing to report his death. He must also participate in psychiatric counseling and substance abuse treatment.
Robinson has about 16 months of credit for time served in jail.
“He didn’t just die,” said Tench’s mother, Tracie Blanton, when speaking at Robinson’s first plea hearing in March. “He threw him away like a piece of trash. ... He hid him from us and we can have no closure.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated one of the charges.
This story was originally published July 31, 2025 at 2:48 PM.
