Arizona teen owned his first gun at 13. Now he's facing 20 year sentence in fatal drive-by
An 18-year-old has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the 2020 drive-by shooting death of Arizona State University student Carlos Garcia.
Kevontay Myers, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, pled guilty to second-degree murder and assisting a criminal street gang. In Arizona, anyone 15 years or older accused of certain felony crimes must be charged as an adult.
The shooting took place outside a Kwik Korner convenience store in south Phoenix on the night of July 2, 2020. Garcia, 19, was hit while waiting in line for the walk-up window. Shots were fired from a gray Chevy Impala.
Police said that though Myers was only 15, he had a history of gang involvement. According to court records, the intended target of the shooting was a member of a rival gang, who was present at the scene.
Garcia was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a probation report, a Phoenix police detective said the case's focus narrowed to Myers when his social media profiles surfaced. The detective said that Myers' posts often featured weapons and contained allusions to gang affiliations.
But defense lawyers argued that Myers' life has been shaped by neglect and violence, including the fatal shooting of his teenage brother. They said they intended to explain the events that led up to the Kwik Korner shooting, not to minimize Garcia's death.
The case against Kevontay Myers has raised questions about police and prosecutor conduct. It also came to exemplify conflicting views on juvenile offenders with a history of gang activity.
Who was Carlos Garcia?
Garcia was a junior majoring in computer science. His mother, Christina Garcia, said that Carlos Garcia hoped to enlist in the Air Force after graduation. Having spent time in Germany after high school, he wanted to be stationed there as an officer. He would have been the second in his family to graduate from college.
That night, Garcia had wrapped up a shift at a Chipotle restaurant before going to the Kwik Korner. He told his mother that he was picking up an energy drink and something to eat, planning to spend the night working on a summer course.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. Another witness said that he "felt Carlos Garcia's last breath."
Police said that the gray Impala was captured by convenience store surveillance footage. According to court documents, investigators identified the vehicle and questioned the driver. The driver, also a minor at the time of the shooting, became a state witness, to whom prosecutors granted immunity.
According to court documents, police matched fingerprints taken from the car to Myers.
Myers was indicted on Dec. 20, 2020, and arrested the next month. He was charged with nine counts, including first-degree murder, drive-by shooting, and assisting a criminal street gang.
This year on May 19, Myers agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and assisting a criminal street gang. The sentencing range was 18 to 22 years.
Sentencing moves forward despite misconduct allegations
The sentencing hearing had initially been set for June 19. But at 5:10 p.m. on June 15, one business day before the hearing, prosecutors emailed defense lawyers with instructions to come to their office with a large USB drive.
According to court documents, prosecutors said they “erroneously” neglected to disclose a year of jail calls. Deputy County Attorney Heather Livingstone said that she planned to use some of those calls in her sentencing memo to justify seeking the maximum prison term of 22 years.
The new materials included thousands of calls made by Myers from Maricopa County Jail, including video visits. Collins said that there was no time to review such a volume of material.
In an email sent to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge William Wingard, Collins characterized the last-minute disclosure of evidence as an "emergency." He said that prosecutors had engaged in a "pattern of discovery violations," including concerns about police misconduct brought up by an unrelated homicide case.
The court agreed to omit the jail calls from sentencing considerations and set a new hearing for July. The judge declined a June 22 motion to dismiss the case.
In that motion, Collins included exhibits related to both the late discovery and possible police misconduct that had surfaced in an unrelated case.
In the court's response, Judge Wingard indicated that Myers could withdraw from the plea agreement to pursue the dismissal. But Myers wanted to move forward with the sentencing.
In an interview with the Arizona Republic, Collins said that withdrawing from the plea was "taking a huge risk" with a possible life sentence for Myers.
"We shouldn't have been put in that position in the first place," Collins said, referring to how prosecution had dealt with disclosing evidence.
In a reply to the motion to dismiss, prosecution said that there were no due process violations with regards to police misconduct or the late disclosure of jail calls. Neither, they said, would have disproven Myers' guilt or led to a dismissal.
"Defense counsel relies upon inflammatory language in an attempt to manufacture a due process violation that does not exist," prosecution wrote.
They also pointed out that defense lawyers never disclosed the educational and health records they used in their sentencing memo.
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Ahead of the July 21 sentencing hearing, prosecutors submitted a new memo, citing recordings that had been disclosed earlier this year.Prosecutors used them as they had wanted to use the recordings that had been thrown out: to characterize Myers as a hardened criminal without remorse for his actions.
During the hearing, Collins argued that the excerpts were "cherry-picked" by prosecutors and that Myers had matured in the two years since the recordings were taken.
As part of its report, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office submitted a series of screenshots from Myers’ Facebook and Instagram accounts, posted before his arrest.
Livingstone wrote that Myers is “proud to be a gang member” and has little regard for the justice system. She pointed to Myers’ 14 previous referrals to juvenile court, though only two were misdemeanors – one for property damage and one for disorderly conduct. The rest were probation violations.
Defense lawyers painted a more nuanced portrait of Kevontay Myers, one they say contextualizes his actions at the south Phoenix Kwik Korner.
In their sentencing memorandum, lawyers for Myers said that he did not expect to encounter the rival gang member at the convenience store. Myers described seeing that person reach for what he thought was a gun.
At that moment, the filing said, Myers “[realized] he was going to die.”
A fraught sentencing hearing
At the July 21 sentencing hearing, prosecutors said there was little evidence for this interpretation of events. But defense lawyers believed that Myers' personal history explains why he may have instinctively turned towards violence at the Kwik Korner.
The defense's sentencing memo laid out Myers' path towards the "vicious cycle of retaliatory shootings that has plagued south Phoenix."
Myers, the youngest of eight children, grew up in a tumultuous household. At the sentencing hearing, his sister described a childhood rife with instability. She recalled sleeping in cars and brushing her teeth in gas station restrooms.
The defense’s sentencing memorandum characterized Myers’ father as violent and his mother as neglectful. Myers has a documented history of serious intellectual and psychological challenges, which went untreated.
The defense described Myers’ foray into gang activity as a survival tactic. According to court documents, his mother “instructed [Myers] in the necessity of gang protection.”
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According to the report, Myers fired his first gun at 12. By 13, he had his own gun, which he kept under his pillow while he slept.
Myers’ older brother, Kenyon Myers, was killed at 17 in a gang-related shooting in south Phoenix on April 20, 2020. Kevontay Myers was present, and his brother passed out in his arms before dying the next day. The murder was never solved.
During the sentencing hearing, Myers apologized to the Garcia family. He described the aftermath of his brother’s death and how it changed him.
“I never meant to make another family feel the same pain,” Myers said.
Myers' older sister said that she hoped, one day, the Garcia family might forgive her brother.
Friends and family of Carlos Garcia asked the judge for the maximum sentence of 22 years.
The state's sentencing memo included several letters written by some of Garcia's cousins, who described their extended family as tight knit.
"Why can this cruel, selfish individual still get to live out his adulthood while my cousin an innocent soul never got to live his," one read.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Teen's 20-year sentence spotlights cycles of gang violence in Phoenix
