Del. woman sentenced to prison for shooting a teenager during Pottstown street fight

A Delaware woman brought a gun with her to help settle a dispute between her cousin and a group of Pottstown teens, Montgomery County prosecutors said Thursday.

And in the street fight that followed, they said, a 14-year-old girl was shot once in the chest at point-blank range and it was by only a “complete miracle” that she survived her injuries.

Tiffany Agosto, 22, was sentenced to six to 13 years in state prison for aggravated assault, a charge she pleaded guilty to in December.

The shooting, which unfolded on July 2, 2024, outside a home in Pottstown’s Bright Hope community, came at the height of a street fight that sent people scattering for cover, according to Assistant District Attorney Robert B. George.

Howard Cancel Jr., 20, the cousin Agosto said she was trying to defend, is serving 2½ to eight years in state prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy, simple assault, and related crimes for his involvement in the incident.

George, in discussing the case, said Cancel and Agosto were the only adults at the scene on Myrtle Street and the only people armed with weapons. The two went to Pottstown “intentionally trying to settle some score,” he said.

“They claim this was an accident, but it’s my position that with the series of steps taken, it’s impossible for that to be an accident,” George said. “The logical outcome would be extreme violence, as it was here.”

The victim was shot once her in chest, and the bullet exited through her back. She was taken to Reading Hospital, where she was treated for several days.

Agosto’s attorney, George Griffith, said she was coming to the aid of a family member who was being harassed and repeatedly beaten up, albeit in a way that she now regrets.

“She did things the wrong way, got a firearm, and I honestly think it was her intention to display that firearm with the hopes that people would back away and not mess with her cousin anymore,” he said.

“But it soon devolved into a street fight where it became two on one, two people against Tiffany, and it quickly became a struggle for the firearm.”

Investigators said multiple witnesses told them that Cancel and Agosto first approached them earlier at a nearby park on Shoemaker Road. There, Agosto flashed a 9mm handgun in an attempt to intimidate them, asking whether they had been talking to her “little cousin like that,” and the group fled, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest.

Later, Cancel drove a Dodge Charger to the victim’s home. There, surveillance video showed the two, wearing ski masks, confronting the group a second time, the affidavit said. A fight broke out between Agosto and two of the teens, and she drew her gun and fired.

Cancel, wielding a knife, attempted to intervene, the document said. After the shooting, he drove him and his cousin away from the scene.

Agosto, of Townsend, Del., was not licensed to carry a concealed weapon. The day after the Pottstown shooting, she was sentenced to five months of probation in Delaware County after pleading guilty in an unrelated incident in 2022 to carrying a gun without a license.