Andre Bowie was just 17 when he was arrested and charged with killing two men in West Philadelphia in the fall of 2020.
But a jury acquitted him of those crimes, and he walked free in May 2023.
Three years later, Bowie, now 22, is back in jail — again accused of killing two people.
Police said Bowie and several others drove to 60th and Delancey Streets on the night of March 30, and opened fire on a group of people standing outside a corner bar, wounding three and killing Paul “PJ” Cobb and Naasir Boyd, both 24.
More than a dozen shots were fired from three different 9mm handguns, police said. In the hours after the shooting, police found the Mercedes on fire on the 1200 block of Cumberland Street.
Another man, Marquis Andrews, is also expected to be charged, police said. Andrews, 22, has been in custody since April after he was charged with illegally carrying a loaded gun, court records show.
The deaths of Cobb and Boyd, childhood friends born and raised in the neighborhood, came amid what law enforcement officials described as an escalating feud between the crews “Northside” and “Southside” in West Philadelphia — groups that have warred across the Market Street corridor for more than a decade.
Cobb’s and Boyd’s killings not only devastated their families, but police said the shooting likely led to another. The week after they were killed, police said, four Southside affiliates seeking revenge opened fire on a Northside rival standing outside a corner store at 60th and Market Streets.
Instead, the bullets struck and killed 20-year-old Imani Ringgold, who was walking with a slice of pizza and talking to her grandmother on the phone — and who had nothing to do with the feud.
One detective, at a recent court hearing, testified that at least 30 people have been killed in connection with the groups’ conflicts since 2015 — a beef that has festered for so long that many people at the center don’t even know how it started.
Bowie’s cases
Prosecutors previously said the first two killings Bowie was charged with — and later acquitted of — were also tied to the Northside-Southside feud.
In that case, lifelong friends Jarell Jackson and Shahjahan McCaskill, both 26, were driving near 57th Street and Locust Avenue when three gunmen jumped out of a black SUV and fired more than two dozen bullets into their car, killing them, in October 2020.
Investigators at the time said they believed the gunmen were Northside members who shot up the car in a botched retaliation for an earlier homicide.
Chesley Lightsey, then-homicide chief at the district attorney’s office, said Jackson, a Jefferson Health technician who mentored troubled teens, and McCaskill, who was a cancer survivor and small-business owner, had nothing to do with that conflict. The men, she said, “were targeted because of the neighborhood they live in.”
Bowie was among three teens charged. But at the May 2023 trial, jurors acquitted him and his co-defendants. (Bowie was convicted of illegal gun possession in the case, and sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in jail, allowing his immediate parole, court records show.)
Marisa Palmer, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said in an emailed statement that at Bowie’s trial, prosecutors presented witness testimony, and social media, video, and firearm-related evidence that prosecutors “believed established the defendants’ guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The office respects the jury’s decision, she said. She called the new allegations against Bowie “deeply concerning,” and declined to comment further.
Bowie was taken into custody last week and charged with two counts of murder, as well as three counts of attempted murder, arson, and related crimes.
Investigators tied Bowie to the crime after his cell phone location data placed him near the scene of the shooting, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest. Andrews’ cell data also links him to the crime, the affidavit says, and call detail records and text messages show the two men were in communication in the hours after the killings.
The records say that police also recovered the murder weapon linked to Bowie. During an April 30 car stop in Kensington, the records say, police encountered Bowie and another man, and officers recovered a 9mm handgun that a ballistics test showed was used in the killings of Boyd and Cobb.
Court records did not list an attorney for Bowie.
Families in mourning
Boyd and Cobb have deep ties to the neighborhood, and were killed just blocks from where they lived.
Cobb’s mother said in an interview that her son was raised in a house at 60th and Delancey, and that she had countless memories of him playing and riding bikes on the block where he was killed. He was the eldest son of a large, blended family.
Cobb’s mother and sisters, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said he was goofy and protective, loyal and independent. He attended Sayre High School, before earning his GED, they said, and worked in construction with his father.
But his favorite role, they said, was being an uncle to his many nieces and nephews. He picked several of them up from school and daycare each day, and cared for them as if they were his own until his sisters finished work.
The sisters said they now tell their kids their favorite “Uncle P” is “in the sky.”
One older sister said that on a recent flight, her 3-year-old kept staring out the airplane window, looking for him in the clouds.
“She asked ‘Mom, where’s Uncle P at?’” she said. “And I had to tell her, ‘He’s further in the sky than we are on the plane.’”
His death, they said, has fractured their lives and ability to feel safe in their neighborhood.
Cobb’s mother said the conflicts of Northside and Southside have always loomed. Her son was not affiliated with Southside, she said, but having grown up on blocks at the center of the group’s feuds, he was cautious about his whereabouts, and she often worried about him.
When she first heard police made an arrest, she said, she was relieved. But learning that Bowie had been charged and acquitted before left her uneasy.
“There are things that happened,” she said, “that could have prevented this.”
