Category: Crime & Justice

A 21-year-old man was ordered to spend decades in prison for killing two teens in 2022 and 2023 — including firing dozens of bullets outside Roxborough High School in a shooting that left a 14-year-old dead and four other teens seriously wounded.

Following an emotional sentencing hearing Friday, Common Pleas Court Judge J. Scott O’Keefe ordered Zaakir McClendon to serve 40 to 80 years in prison for his part in the shootings that killed Nicolas Elizalde and Nafis Betrand-Hill seven months apart.

McClendon’s streak of violence began when he was 17. First, on Sept. 27, 2022, he and five others drove to Roxborough High School looking to shoot a teen who McClendon believed had hurt a young woman he was close to, said Assistant District Attorney Ashley Toczylowski.

They parked their dark green Ford Explorer outside the school’s football field, and as dozens of kids walked toward the locker room, McClendon and four others fired more than 60 shots in all directions toward the players.

Five teens were shot. Nicolas Elizalde, a junior varsity player, was struck once in the chest by a stray bullet. His mother, Meredith, ran to his side in the aftermath, and held him as he died.

“This was a planned, coordinated mass shooting at a high school football game,” Toczylowski said. “And [McClendon] was the reason why this happened.”

In the months after the shooting, homicide detectives identified five of the six people involved, ranging in age from 15 to 21. But McClendon remained free and unknown to police for years.

In that time, he killed again.

On the night of April 13, 2023, McClendon and at least two others drove to 23rd Street and West Montgomery Avenue in North Philadelphia, where they shot Nafis Betrand-Hill, 16, multiple times near his home.

McClendon was finally charged with both killings last year, after DNA evidence linked him to each crime scene: on a fired cartridge casing recovered at Roxborough and on a blue sweatshirt worn by one of the gunman who killed Betrand-Hill.

He pleaded guilty to both murders in April.

Ashante Betrand on Friday remembered her stepson, Nafis, as full of life and joy, “a child who deserved to grow up surrounded by love.“ A sophomore at Sayre High School, he was the oldest of four brothers and three sisters. They called him ”Fisso” or “Bo.”

Her family, she said, will never stop grieving the “many ordinary but precious moments of adulthood” that he will never experience. They still don’t understand why he was targeted, she said.

“His life was worth more than a name, a reputation, a street,” she said, adding: “We will never stop loving him, we will never stop missing him and his light.”

Nicolas Elizalde’s aunt and grandmother spoke next. They wanted McClendon to know about the gentle person he killed — how Nick loved rescuing animals, watching Marvel movies, playing with Legos, and swimming in the pool. He was a freshman at Walter B. Saul High, and should have been finally heading off to college this fall.

“Did you know that, Mr. McClendon? Do you care?” Nick’s grandmother Marge LaRue asked.

“I don’t know you, and I don’t want to,” she said. “But you brought evil to my family, and it’s ugly and it’s lonely here. We are joyless. We are empty.”

Then, Meredith Elizalde stood up, ordering McClendon to look at her. It was the least he could do, she said, after ruining her life.

McClendon, his small frame hunched in a wooden chair, looked toward her briefly, before turning away again as she spoke.

When two other teens involved with the crime pleaded guilty last year, Elizalde was firm, but compassionate. She had met and spoken with each of them before their sentencings, and asked a judge to allow each of them to spend a piece of their lives free in Nick’s honor.

But McClendon, she said Friday, mocked her family and her son’s life by running free for years after the shooting — and killing again. She said she would not ask for any leniency.

“Did you watch my pleas on TV?” she asked. “I hope to leave this courtroom and never think of you again.”

Finally, McClendon spoke. His actions, he said, were cowardly.

“I was still young, your children were still young,” he said, beginning to cry. “I’m sorry. I’m mad it happened the way it did. I’m mad I even made that decision.”

“I cannot look you in the eyes because I gotta live with what I did,” he said. “I am a menace to the community. … but I will try to be better.”

His mother’s sobs filled the courtroom as he spoke. Moments earlier, she told the judge she’d raised her son in a loving home. He was a funny, curious child who grew up attending Catholic schools and playing sports. It didn’t make sense.

At the judge’s sentence, she collapsed into herself.

After the court hearing, Meredith Elizalde asked the public to remember her son and what he loved — nature, museums, learning — and to invest less in punishment for violence and more in the people, places, and institutions that can prevent it.

“On Sept. 27, the fourth anniversary of Nick’s murder, the Academy of Natural Sciences — one of Nick’s favorite places and where he celebrated his ninth birthday — is closing its doors to the public.”

“Think about what these places represent, where children encounter science and nature … and discover the world is bigger than them and there is a place for them in it,” she said. “We cannot punish our way into a healthy society. Prevention is investment, art, nature, community.”

Accountability for her son’s death belongs to all Philadelphians, she said, and that means protecting the children who are still here.

Elizalde and her family will return to the courthouse in February, when the three remaining defendants charged with her son’s death are expected to face trial.

For the seven months he lived on Manayunk’s streets before he was shot and killed, Joshua Daywalt’s mother said she tried to persuade him to come back to the life waiting for him.

Jennifer Daywalt, of Phoenixville, ticked off the list: She regularly brought him bottled water, chips, and other easy-to-carry snacks at the encampment he frequented. She brought reassurance, too, reminding him that his family — three sisters, one brother, and two children — loved him and wanted him back home.

Authorities recovered Daywalt’s body from the frigid waters of the Schuylkill near Kelly Drive and Midvale Avenue on Feb. 7, 2025. A day later, a city medical examiner determined he had been shot at least once in the head, just behind his right ear, turning what had been a death investigation into a homicide.

And on Thursday, a Philadelphia judge found Roger Gosson guilty of killing Daywalt, 35, delivering the outcome his mother said she had been advocating for since the day she learned her son was gone.

“I need people to know that not everyone who is homeless is unloved,” Jennifer Daywalt said. “I never stopped trying. I never stopped begging. I never stopped fighting for him.”

Gosson, 63, was convicted of third-degree murder and related crimes in Daywalt’s shooting death, following the two-day bench trial in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

Gosson — a homeless man living in an intricate, multilevel setup inside a hole in the Green Lane Bridge — became detectives’ lead suspect in part because of body-worn camera footage from a patrol officer who encountered him a month before the killing. In the video, Gosson complained that “somebody [has] got to do something about” Daywalt, whom he accused of stealing from other homeless people in the area.

Later, inside Gosson’s living space, police recovered the gun they say was used to kill Daywalt .

Gosson’s fingerprints and DNA, however, were not found on the handgun. And without cellphones to track his movements or street cameras to capture the shooting, prosecutors’ case against Gosson was, as Assistant District Attorney Ashley Toczylowski acknowledged during her closing argument on Thursday, anything but typical.

“But,” she said, “that doesn’t mean we don’t know what happened.”

Judge Charles Ehrlich spent less than 10 minutes deliberating before returning a guilty verdict Thursday afternoon. Even so, a case built largely from the testimony of other homeless men created obstacles for prosecutors and, at one point, threatened to unravel before it ever reached trial.

The witnesses had told police in the weeks after Daywalt’s body was found that Gosson confessed to the killing in a series of conversations and, in one case, a note written on a napkin that was never recovered. But on Thursday, one of those witnesses disputed his previous account, blaming a drug-induced haze for his loose lips and claiming he couldn’t recall his videotaped interview with police.

And last month, Gosson’s trial was postponed for the fifth time after prosecutors said police had been unable to locate that same witness. The delay prompted Gosson’s defense attorney, Gina Amarillo, to ask the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that prosecutors had already taken more than the 365 days allowed by law to bring Gosson to trial.

Ehrlich denied her motion. And to ensure the trial could begin on Thursday with the key witness, prosecutors held him in jail on a material witness warrant ahead of the court date.

At the delayed August trial date, Detective Craig Coulter testified that he’d tried to find the homeless witness for three weeks without success, calling him “a constant moving target.”

“It’s like trying to find a squirrel in the woods,” he said. “That’s what all the witnesses in this case have been like.”

Amarillo argued on Thursday that prosecutors had relied on speculation to accuse Gosson of a killing for which no hard evidence had been found implicating him. Changing unreliable witness testimony, she said, was “not enough to say Mr. Gosson did this beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“My client was hoping for a different verdict based on the evidence presented,” Amarillo said in a phone interview Thursday night. She added that they will likely appeal the judge’s verdict.

Outside the courtroom, Jennifer Daywalt remembered her son as a “brilliant artist” who’d first picked up pencils to draw at 4, she said. He gravitated toward portraits in pencil and charcoal, often of his favorite hard-rock bands, she said.

Before he began living on the streets of Manayunk, Daywalt left four psychiatric hospitalizations intended to stabilize him after he stopped taking medication for his diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder, Jennifer Daywalt said. His illnesses, she guessed, may have caused him to steal. “It made him feel as if he couldn’t conform to society,” she said.

Jennifer Daywalt said she has appealed to lawmakers to change the state’s laws on hospital commitments, and will continue to fight for mandatory holding periods and follow-ups that she believes could have saved her son.

For now, she said: “It felt good that the judge saw what the rest of us saw. It felt like Joshua’s voice was heard.”

Gosson is scheduled to be sentenced in December.