Six Coatesville men sentenced to prison, two for life, in an ill-fated revenge plot that left a friend dead

In August 2023, Dametrius “Meechie” McClain-Jackson had a path out of Coatesville, his family said Friday. He was just days away from returning to Lycoming College for his sophomore year and playing for the school’s football team.

Instead, he got caught up in a cycle of violence that Chester County Chief Deputy District Attorney Andrea Cardamone said is all too common in the community.

McClain-Jackson, along with six of his friends, armed themselves with guns and sought revenge for being disrespected. But the only casualty was McClain-Jackson, killed accidentally by one of his coconspirators.

And on Friday, nearly three years to the day after the fatal shooting, all six surviving members of the conspiracy were sentenced to state prison by Judge Alita Rovito.

“There is this idea that what it means to be a man, what it means to be tough, to be worthy of respect, is to carry a gun,” Cardamone said. “It’s a tragic view that leads to too many young people killed, and it victimizes the entire city of Coatesville.”

At its core, Friday’s hourslong hearing was about the two men who prosecutors said were most culpable: Victor Lara-Ortiz, one of the gunmen involved in the shooting, and Zaire Harley, who supplied weapons to the group and then drove them through the city, searching for their intended target.

For their roles, both men were sentenced to life in prison.

Lara-Ortiz, 22, and Harley, 23, were convicted of first-degree murder earlier this year under the legal principle of transferred intent. Though they were looking to attack Elijah Green, a criminal rival, they accidentally killed McClain-Jackson.

Some of McClain-Jackson’s family took turns Friday addressing his friends, expressing shock and outrage that men who grew up with him would be involved with his death.

“That night, people I consider family were there, people I trusted my life with,” McClain-Jackson’s sister Lyamoni Jones said through her tears. “But I couldn’t trust them with my brother’s life.”

Samaria Turner said her brother’s murder has left a “Meechie-sized hole that can never be filled.”

“My brother wasn’t perfect; nobody is,” she said. “But I should not be speaking about him in the past tense. I should remember what his voice sounds like without having to watch a video of him.”

It was unclear who fired the fatal shot, and prosecutors were never able to recover any of the guns wielded by the group that night.

The group’s animosity toward Green began on Instagram, after he posted a video taking credit for a shooting weeks earlier that wounded Harley and another man, and taunted them for not retaliating. It reached its peak hours before the fatal shooting, when Green confronted another member of the group, Quadir Lavender, and threatened to kill him.

The four other suspects involved in the fatal shooting: Markel Jones, 23; Richard Rochester-Cottle, 24; Lavender, 19; and Gary White, 22, pleaded guilty in the months leading up to the trial and testified for the prosecution.

Rochester-Cottle and White pleaded guilty to conspiracy and third-degree murder, while the others pleaded guilty to manslaughter, conspiracy, and related crimes.

The sentences for the four other defendants varied, from 5-to-10 years in prison to as much as 10-to-21 years. Rovito noted that they each played a specific, and different, role in the ill-fated shooting.

“You knew guns kill. You knew none of you should’ve had them and you know you can’t take this back,” she said. “I hope a day doesn’t go by where you don’t think of Meechie and tell him you’re sorry.”

The group rode together on Aug. 23, 2023, in a Chevrolet Traverse that Rochester-Cottle had stolen from a Sheetz in Berks County in search of Green, according to testimony. The car’s owner had also left his loaded .308 handgun inside the vehicle. That gun, witnesses told police, would later be used by Lara-Ortiz during the shooting.

When they found Green and his friends in the driveway of a home on Community Lane, Lara-Ortiz, McClain-Jackson, Rochester-Cottle, and White got out of the vehicle, prosecutors said. All but White opened fire — having second thoughts, he fled the scene, running all the way home before firing a single shot, according to prosecutors.

One of the bullets struck McClain-Jackson in the back and hit his lungs. He was later pronounced dead at Paoli Hospital.

Rochester-Cottle and Lavender, horrified at what happened to their friend, stayed behind with him to call 911 and ensure medics would find him. That gesture earned them some leniency from Rovito, who also gave credit to Jones for calling McClain-Jackson’s family to notify them of what happened.

But Lara-Ortiz and Harley showed no remorse, prosecutors said, and made calculated moves to hide their involvement, including fleeing to Lincoln University in an attempt to create a false alibi.

They even lied to McClain-Jackson’s mother, telling her they had no idea what had happened to him. And later, when he learned that White was cooperating with police, Lara-Ortiz allegedly sent him death threats.

Rovito admonished them both for their callousness.

“This really is so, so senseless,” she said. “This was a waste of seven lives, and you both actively worked to hide the truth.”

Prosecutors pointed out that Lara-Ortiz’s involvement in the shooting came six months after he professed to a different Chester County judge that he would stop carrying illegal guns, and seek a life away from crime.

He made that promise after being sentenced to five years of probation in the death of his younger brother, Roman Aguilar-Ortiz, who accidentally killed himself with a loaded Glock handgun that Lara-Ortiz left unsecured in his bedroom.