BALTIMORE — A Baltimore man was sentenced to life plus 52 years in prison for a shooting spree near Mondawmin Mall in 2019 that left one man dead and injured three others.
Levar Mullen-El died from the injuries he sustained in the shooting April 11, 2019, which left a crime scene that stretched multiple city blocks, the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office said in a news release.
A jury on Oct. 7 found Donte Patterson, 29, of the Alameda, guilty of second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and using a firearm in a crime of violence.
Circuit Judge Barry Williams handed down Patterson’s sentence Jan. 12. The state’s attorney’s office said 15 years of Patterson’s life sentence will be served without the possibility of parole.
Patterson’s attorney, Roland Harris, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Online court records show Harris has already filed an appeal to Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals.
A shot spotter alert summoned Baltimore police to the area of Mondawmin Mall around 11:17 a.m., prosecutors said. An officer found four people who had been shot, including Mullen-El, who later died from his injuries
The 2200 block of Ruskin Avenue was dotted with 9mm and .40 caliber shell casings, according to prosecutors.
The state’s attorney’s office said police pieced together the case using surveillance footage, license plate reader technology and a jail phone call, determining the April 11 shooting was carried out in retaliation to a double homicide the night before.
Marcus Alston, 20, and Diarah Baxter, 21, died in the shooting April 10. Police have said a 19-year-old man was shot in the leg during the same encounter.
A camera captured a silver Infiniti at the scene of the shooting near Mondawmin Mall, and the technology available to police confirmed the vehicle was at the scene of the homicides a night earlier in the area of North Chester Street and East North Avenue That intersection is around the city’s South Clifton Park and Broadway East neighborhoods.
Prosecutors said an inmate named Rodney Baxter, in custody at the time for a shooting he was later convicted of, placed a call around 8 p.m. April 11 and referenced in detail the people killed in the double homicide April 10.
The person Baxter was speaking to, who prosecutors did not identify in the news release, told Baxter he retaliated for the killings. There were five people in Patterson’s Infiniti at the time of the shootings near the mall, the state’s attorney’s office said.
It’s unclear if anyone else was arrested or charged in connection to the shooting.
Police found the Infiniti six days later, with Patterson sitting on the hood. According to prosecutors, Patterson told investigators in a taped statement that Alston and Baxter were close friends of his and he claimed the Infiniti.
The state’s attorney’s office said shell casings found in Patterson’s car matched those recovered from the crime scene around the mall, and prosecutors said there was a video on Patterson’s cellphone captured about an hour before the shooting near Mondawmin in which he was pictured with a gun on his lap.
“Revenge and retaliatory acts circumvent the criminal justice process and simply continue the destructive cycle of violence,” State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said in a statement. The stiff sentence ensures that Mr. Patterson will never pull a trigger on our streets again.”
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