Court upholds man's conviction for gunning down three outside a Dorchester house party in 2009

The Supreme Judicial Court today re-affirmed Keron Pierre's first-degree murder sentence for killing two women and a man outside a Mt. Ida Road house party in 2009 because the women wouldn't give him and his buddies their phone numbers.

The ruling means Pierre will spend the rest of his life behind bars, without the possibility of parole, for the murders of Shacora Gaines, Chantal Palmer, and Anthony Peoples. That he was only charged with three murders instead of four is because another woman he was aiming at ducked when he opened fire on their car early on March 29, 2009 on Mt. Ida Road near Fox Street; two bullets went through her coat, but missed her

According to a court summary of the case, the three women and Peoples were in a Nissan Sentra getting ready to leave the site of a weekly Mt. Ida house party - the homeowners even sold food - when a group of men, including Pierre, walked up to the car and asked "what's good, ladies" and tried to get their numbers. The women declined. Peoples, in the back seat, told the group the women weren't interested and asked them to back up from the car. They didn't, so he grew more insistent: "Back the fuck off the car."

One of Pierre's pals then told Peoples, no, he better shut up, because the group was "strapped" or armed:

He then produced a handgun and pointed it at Peoples for three or four seconds, while Peoples looked at him. When Peoples turned his head away, the defendant shot him, then turned the weapon and fired at Palmer in the front seat. The defendant leaned in and continued firing, while Boswell ran to his vehicle as the defendant continued shooting. ...

The medical examiner later determined that Palmer had sustained four bullet wounds to her neck and torso, which, combined, caused her death; Gaines had sustained four bullet wounds to her torso and her arm, with the wound to her torso being fatal; and Peoples had sustained five bullet wounds, of which the wound to his torso was fatal. Most of the injuries moved from the left to the right sides of the victims' bodies; all of the shell casings and projectiles found in the vehicle or next to it had been fired by the same .40 caliber weapon.

The next day, Pierre asked his fiance's mother to buy him a ticket to Trinidad, where his son lived; he flew there on April 2. He was extradited in 2013 and convicted in 2014.

The state's highest court agreed with Pierre's lawyer that the prosecutor asked some impermissible questions about why he hadn't confessed to a Boston police officer who called him while he was on Trinidad about the murders, but said that the weight of the other evidence against him was so compelling that he would have been convicted anyway.