Man acquitted in Wilkinsburg mass shooting pleads to gun charge
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Darnell Mahone logged in to the federal court hearing Tuesday to watch the man he believes killed his daughter in a mass shooting plead guilty to a gun charge.
It isn’t as much as he’d hoped for — the plea agreement Cheron Shelton reached with the U.S. Attorney’s office calls for an eight-year prison sentence. Mahone said afterward, “it’s better than nothing.”
“We’re happy something was done after all the mess that happened with the other trial,” Mahone said.
His daughter Shada Mahone, 26, was killed in the March 9, 2016, mass shooting in Wilkinsburg that, ultimately, left six adults and an unborn child dead.
Shelton and co-defendant Robert Thomas were both charged in connection with the shooting. An hour before opening statements of the trial, a state court judge threw out the charges against Thomas when the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office said it would not call the key witness against him because of credibility issues.
Then, following a two-week trial, a jury found Shelton not guilty on all charges.
Darnell Mahone said Tuesday that he blames the verdict on the DA’s office.
“There were clearly some major missteps that happened,” he said. “It was a dumpster fire.”
Among those missteps, key evidence in the case that corroborated testimony placing Shelton just a few houses away from the scene moments after the shooting never made it to the jury because it was never turned over to the defense team as required.
The prosecution, over the course of the case, said that it would call three different jailhouse witnesses to testify, but ended up calling none of them.
Further, defense attorneys contended that the prosecution failed to turn over information that one of those witnesses allegedly confessed to killing a 15-month-old boy in 2013 but was not charged. That same person also received financial consideration and relocation by law enforcement, which was not disclosed to the defense.
Mahone said he believed that people should have lost their jobs over how the case was handled.
“It looks systemic,” he said. “It kind of leaves you wondering if it had the priority it probably should have.”
Eleven days after Shelton was found not guilty in the homicide case, the U.S. Attorney’s office indicted him on one count of possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon.
“It was something to put some hope into,” Mahone said. “But it’s lacking. We wanted more. We hoped for more.”
As part of the plea agreement with Shelton, the U.S. Attorney’s office has agreed it will not pursue any additional charges against him for the 2016 mass shooting.
The defendant appeared via video conferencing from the Allegheny County Jail for the hearing before U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab. He will be sentenced on April 22.
“We’d like to see the same sentence we’re going through apply to this young man. This young man has the potential to see his family again,” Mahone said. “We don’t have that luxury — not in this life anyway.”
According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, Shelton, who was convicted of felony drug charges in 2010, is not permitted to possess a firearm.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Maloney told Schwab that investigators working the Wilkinsburg shooting did a search at Shelton’s mother’s home on Nolan Court in Homewood North on March 12, 2016.
There, he said, they found a Colt M4 .22-caliber rifle in a living room closet. They also recovered a magazine containing 29 rounds of .22-caliber ammunition.
Analysts found a print from Shelton’s left thumb on the rifle, which had been stolen in Uniontown in 2015, Maloney said.
That gun was not used in the Wilkinsburg shooting. Police said that a group of family and friends were gathered for a backyard cookout on Franklin Avenue when Thomas fired a handgun at them, causing them to flee toward the back porch.
Then, investigators said, Shelton fired an assault-style rifle at them. Killed in the shooting were siblings Jerry Shelton, 35, Brittany Powell, 27, and Chanetta Powell, 25; their cousin, Tina Shelton, 37; family friend Shada Mahone; and Chanetta Powell’s unborn son, Demetrius.
John Ellis, who was paralyzed in the shooting, died as a result of complications from his condition in September.
Casings found at the scene matched the head stamp of the ammunition found in the search of Shelton’s mother’s home, investigators said.