The man who walked through the streets of Kingsessing and shot people at random in 2023, killing five and wounding five others in one of Philadelphia’s deadliest mass shootings, pleaded guilty Wednesday to multiple counts of murder and was sentenced to decades in prison.
Kimbrady Carriker, 43, admitted that on the evening of July 3, 2023, he calmly walked through a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood dressed in body armor and wearing a ski mask, and pointed his AR-15-style rifle at seemingly random passersby — then pulled the trigger.
He killed five people: DaJuan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 21; Dymir Stanton, 29; Ralph Moralis, 59; and Joseph Wamah Jr., 31.
Five others were injured: a 13-year-old boy who he shot multiple times in the legs, and a mother who was driving with her 2-year-old twins and 10-year-old niece when he fired more than a dozen bullets into her car.
Wamah was killed first on the night of July 2, targeted in his home for reasons that remain unclear. Carriker returned to Wamah’s block nearly two days later, armed with the same gun, and shot the others.
Carriker’s admission to the killings marks the end of the legal saga in a shooting that shocked the city, shattered families’ lives, and traumatized a community.
“This was 14 minutes of terror for the residents of the Kingsessing neighborhood,” Assistant District Attorney Robert Wainwright said of Carriker’s carnage that evening.
Carriker’s attorneys were expected to argue at trial that he was legally insane when he gunned down his victims, and that he should be housed in a secure psychiatric facility for most of his life, not state prison.
Carriker suffered from “severe delusions and religious preoccupations,” and “had a fixed illusion that he was working for the National Security Agency,” said Gregg Blender, assistant defender at the Defender Association.
Even after he was arrested, taken to Norristown State Hospital, and medicated, he only believed that he had done something wrong because the “National Security Association personnel did not come and rescue me,” Blender said he told doctors.
Prosecutors disagreed that Carriker was legally insane and said his actions were deliberate and he should spend the rest of his life in state prison. But as they prepared for trial, an expert hired by the District Attorney’s Office interviewed Carriker and agreed with defense lawyers that he did not appear to know that what he was doing that night was wrong.
Prosecutors did not want to risk that a jury might find Carriker not guilty by reason of insanity, Wainwright said. So they offered Carriker the opportunity to plead guilty to five counts of third-degree murder, five counts of attempted murder, and gun crimes. They asked a judge to sentence him to 37½ to 75 years in prison.
On Wednesday, Carriker agreed.
Common Pleas Court Judge Glenn B. Bronson sentenced Carriker to the agreed-upon decades behind bars. Bronson said that, in his 15 years of handling homicide cases, this was the worst he had seen, but that he would respect the deal reached by prosecutors and Carriker’s defense team.
“It traumatized an entire community,” the judge said of the shooting. “It traumatized an entire city.”
Survivors of the shooting, and loved ones of the people who died, spoke emotionally in court Wednesday of the devastation of that night, and the lasting impact on their lives.
The father of Joseph Wamah Jr., consumed by the trauma of finding his son’s dead body inside his home, died earlier this year. His daughter said he could not mend his broken heart, and spiraled into a health crisis.
“He faded in front of my eyes,” Jasmine Wamah said of her father.
Other family members spoke of being hospitalized for their mental health, of looking after children without fathers and caring for kids with bullet scars in their legs.
This is a developing story and will be updated.