A Las Vegas man convicted of firing the first shots in a mass shooting at a St. Paul bar that left one woman dead and 14 people injured was sentenced Friday to nearly 29 years.
Devondre Trevon Phillips, 31, apologized at his sentencing hearing for his role in the gunfight inside the crowded Seventh Street Truck Park Bar on Oct. 10, 2021. He was convicted in February of eight counts of attempted second-degree murder.
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"I just want to say that I’m sorry to the innocent victims and the families of the victims," Phillips said. "I truly am sorry. I’ve lost loved ones to violence and I’ve been a circumstance of violence and it doesn’t give me the right to do what I did."
A different jury last week convicted Terry Lorenzo Brown of second-degree murder in the death of Marquisha "Kiki" Wiley, a 27-year-old veterinary technician from St. Paul, plus four counts of attempted second-degree murder and one of illegally possessing a firearm. He’s scheduled to be sentenced in August. Most Minnesota inmates serve two-thirds of their sentence in prison and the rest on supervised release.
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Prosecutors said Phillips and Brown were in a dispute over domestic abuse allegations involving Brown and the woman he was dating, who Phillips, a former St. Paul resident, described as a cousin of his. Both men exchanged gunfire inside the bar, striking each other and a dozen bystanders.
"We can only dream of the missing pieces of what our Kiki’s life would’ve been," her mother, Beth Wiley, told the court before Ramsey County Judge Carolina Lamas handed down the sentence. Wiley and others wore shirts depicting the victim holding a sign that read, "No more silence, end gun violence."
