Man who killed West Palm teen was spared the death penalty. Here's how he'll pay instead.
WEST PALM BEACH — Prosecutors wanted Larry Darnell Young Jr. either imprisoned for life or sentenced to death for killing 16-year-old Tamia Johnson in 2021. A team of public defenders and a jury that believed them spared the man from both.
Circuit Judge Howard Coates sentenced Young to 40 years in prison for manslaughter Thursday — a penalty one decade longer than his attorneys recommended but several shy of the one he faced had he been convicted of murder.
Coates' decision followed an afternoon of debate over how the 27-year-old gunman should be punished. Most who testified in Young's defense focused on his troubled childhood, delving at times into the burning of sugar cane near his home in Pahokee and his exposure to harmful chemicals.
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Johnson's mother declined to testify and hurried out of the courtroom when Assistant State Attorney Marci Rex began recounting the facts of her daughter's death.
A stray bullet struck and killed Johnson while she sat in a parked car with her parents in West Palm Beach's Pleasant City neighborhood on Dec. 10, 2021. A nearby fight between women — one of whom was Young's girlfriend — precipitated the shooting. Young said he didn't fire a gun upon arriving to pick up his girlfriend, but witnesses testified that the opposite was true.
Rex encouraged the judge to sentence Young to prison "for as long as possible" — in this case, 45 years.
"To suggest that his poor upbringing and pollution and the poverty level of Pahokee is why we're here is a slap in the face to everybody who grows up in Pahokee who doesn't commit crimes," she said.
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The circumstances of Johnson's death were appalling, the prosecutor said — a gunman firing at a crowd of people on a Friday night, a child killed in a nearby car — but it drew less outrage than had it happened in a more affluent neighborhood. She urged the judge to impose a sentence in line with the seriousness of the case — as serious as if it had happened in the town of Palm Beach or the Abacoa section of Jupiter.
"Tamia deserves that same attention," Rex said. "Pleasant City deserves that same attention. These crimes that are occurring in the city, that are killing these children, these beautiful children — "
Assistant Public Defender Renee Sihvola interrupted her with an objection. Prior to Thursday's hearing, she gave Coates a list of the 29 people sentenced to prison for manslaughter in Palm Beach County in the past five years. Their average sentence was 14 years, she wrote, asking Coates to sentence Young to the minimum permitted in his case: 30 years.
Members of Young's family left the courtroom abruptly when Coates sentenced him to 40 years instead. The penalty encompasses the one count of manslaughter and three additional counts of attempted manslaughter jurors convicted him of at the conclusion of his trial in March.
Sihvola has asked the 4th District Court of Appeal to review several of Coates' rulings, including Thursday's sentence.
Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Life in prison or sentenced to death: Gunman in teen's death gets neither.
