Years after 3 Lancaster men were killed and a woman shot, 2 men convicted of murder
Two Lancaster men have been sentenced to long stretches in prison in South Carolina for killings of three people and the wounding of a fourth person in 2014 and 2017, according to prosecutors and court records.
The convictions included the first murder trial in Lancaster County since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered trials in the courts for more than a year.
Jermaine Demarcus Grier, 35, was sentenced to 100 years in prison Friday by resident Circuit Court Judge Brian Gibbons after a jury found Grier guilty in a trial this week that ended Friday, 6th Circuit Solicitor Randy Newman said.
Grier was convicted of murder, attempted murder, burglary and possession of a weapon during a violent crime for the 2014 killing of his brother-in-law and shooting a woman in the neck in Lancaster in 2014, records show. Grier was sentenced to 40 years for murder, 30 years for attempted murder, 25 years for burglary, and five for the gun charge. All sentences are to run consecutively for a total of 100 years, records show.
Second case was drive-by double murder
Earlier this week in Lancaster, visiting Judge Eugene Griffith sentenced Demarcus Javontia Marsh, 38, to 30 years in prison after Marsh pleaded guilty to two counts of murder from a 2018 drive-by shooting double homicide.
The two men were killed outside an apartment complex in Lancaster.
The two cases that ended with convictions this week were unrelated, Newman said.
In South Carolina, defendants convicted of murder must serve their entire sentence and are not eligible for parole, state law shows.
First criminal trials resume since pandemic
Newman, the top prosecutor in Lancaster and Chester counties, lauded the work of 6Th Circuit Deputy Solicitor Lisa Collins and Assistant Solicitors Nicole Bonine, Luck Campbell and Melissa McGinnis in getting the convictions for victims in the older cases.
Lancaster is a city of about 9,000 people south of Charlotte and east of Rock Hill. Lancaster city police and community leaders have for years worked to curtail an ongoing gun violence problem that dates back almost a decade. Lancaster County has about 100,000 people.
South Carolina stopped all trials from March 2020 to April 2021 because of the COVID pandemic. Many murder cases remain pending in court, including several arrests in homicides made during the pandemic.
It remains unclear when prosecutors will call for trial other pending murder cases, including a 2019 mass shooting at a nightclub just outside the city limits where police and prosecutors have said in court and arrest warrants a convicted felon killed two people and wounded eight others at a nightclub.
In that case the suspect charged with two counts of murder and eight counts of assault and battery is accused of jumping on stage during a music show and firing into the crowd.
