City man gets 7 to 20 years in MLK Day killing

The sentencing of an 18-year-old to seven to 20 years in prison is hardly what most people would call a life-affirming event.

But that was the impression left on those at today's sentencing of Bilal Gay of North Philadelphia, who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing a neighborhood adversary watching a basketball game on Martin Luther King Day in a recreation center named for the slain civil-rights leader.

Perhaps it was Gay's heartfelt apology to the family of the victim in the Jan. 18, 2008, shooting: Charles "Frog" Trotman, 17. Or maybe it was the unusual courtroom reconciliation reached by Trotman's mother, Tanya Coleman, and Gay's aunt, Juanita Baldwin, who rescued, raised, and adopted Gay after his traumatic early childhood.

During the hearing, Baldwin stood and turned to Coleman and said, "We're so sorry." Though Coleman did not address the court, she acknowledged Baldwin's remarks. After the hearing the two women talked quietly together in a way that implied this was not the first time they had discussed the tragedy.

"It's one of those rare occasions in these cases where things happened the way they're supposed to," Gay's attorney, Samuel C. Stretton, said after the sentencing before Common Pleas Court Judge Carolyn Engel Temin. "This kid has gone through some amazing changes."

Stretton said Gay witnessed his mother's murder when he was 6 years old. He was then placed with a foster family, where he was abused and "tortured," before going to live with his aunt.

Even Assistant District Attorney Richard Sax seemed accepting of the sentence, though it was below the maximum 16 to 32 years Sax had said he would seek on July 28, after the jury announced its verdict.

According to trial testimony, Gay followed Trotman into the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center, at 2101 Cecil B. Moore Ave., where a basketball game was being played on the King holiday.

Witnesses testified that during a time-out, as Trotman watched from court level, Gay stood in the stands and emptied his five-shot, .22-caliber revolver at his nemesis.

But the jury rejected Sax's call for a first- or third-degree murder verdict, apparently accepting Gay's testimony that he shot and killed Trotman after Trotman allegedly robbed him three times at gunpoint.

Sax argued that there was no evidence Trotman had ever robbed Gay. No gun was found on Trotman's body; neither were the cell phone and $20 that Gay said Trotman had stolen from him at gunpoint 15 minutes before the shooting.

A first-degree murder conviction would have carried a mandatory life sentence with no chance of parole; a third-degree verdict, 20 to 40 years in prison.

Sax said he was pleased that the judge sentenced Gay to the maximum state guideline term for aggravated voluntary manslaughter.

Although Temin told Sax she did not want him to recommend a specific sentence, the judge agreed with the prosecutor's argument that Gay deserved to be sentenced under the longer, "aggravated" criterion.

The judge told Gay that, in addition to killing Trotman, he likely traumatized children and adults who were trapped in the recreation center during the shooting.