'Tried to have my life taken.' Man who plotted gender reveal party shooting pleads guilty

A man who prosecutors say orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot that resulted in a mass shooting at a gender reveal party in Colerain Township, leaving a woman dead and eight others injured, pleaded guilty Wednesday to involuntary manslaughter and attempted murder.

Roshawn Bishop, 33, is the fourth person convicted in the July 2017 mass shooting, which happened at a house on Capstan Drive. James Echols, Michael Sanon and Vandell Slade were convicted and sentenced.

Slade, Echols and Sanon were from Columbus and affiliated with the Crips gang, testimony revealed. Slade is Bishop's cousin.

Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Robert Goering sentenced Bishop to 10 years in prison. He received credit for the more than four years he's been incarcerated on charges related to the shooting.

Bishop played the role of star witness during the January 2022 trial of Echols and Sanon, the two gunmen who opened fire inside the home, which was filled with a group of adults and at least six children, as the party was winding down.

"The case probably would not have been solved without his cooperation," Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Seth Tieger said of Bishop.

Bishop, a self-confessed drug dealer, testified at the trial of Echols and Sanon that he paid the two men $1,500 to kill a woman in order to avoid repaying a $10,000 loan.

Bishop said he was in an extramarital relationship with the woman, Cheyanne Willis.

Willis, then 21, held a gender reveal party at the home that day, although she later admitted she wasn't pregnant, when Echols and Sanon opened the screen door to the living room at about 11:20 p.m. and fired a total of 13 shots, according to testimony at their trial.

It was Willis' 22-year-old cousin, Autum Garrett, who was killed. Willis was shot in the left thigh.

Garrett's husband, 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter were also shot. The Garretts had traveled from Indiana to Cincinnati to attend a wedding and spend time with family, prosecutors said.

"How could you look me in my eyes and still act as if you didn't know anything for years?" Willis said in a tearful statement made in court on Wednesday. "The one person I felt would always stay true to his word tried to have my life taken."

"What was done is unforgivable," she said.

Bishop, handcuffed and wearing a black and white striped jumpsuit, closed his eyes as Willis concluded her statement. He apologized to the victims.

During the trial early last year, Bishop said he tried to call off the shooting after he received a call from Slade, who said the front door of the house was open and there were people inside.

Slade, 34, pleaded guilty last month to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, with credit for the more than three years he'd already been incarcerated.

Slade's role, according to testimony, involved connecting Bishop to Echols and Sanon. Prosecutors say he also drove the gunmen to the Capstan Drive home on July 8, 2017.

Echols was convicted by a Hamilton County jury on nearly two dozen counts, including aggravated murder, and was sentenced to 41 years to life in prison.

Sanon was found guilty of a single attempted murder charge and sentenced to 11 years. That sentence is running consecutively to a sentence from a previous conviction out of Franklin County.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Roshawn Bishop pleads guilty in 2017 gender reveal party shooting