SANTA ANA (CNS) - A 31-year-old Riverside man was sentenced to 14 years in prison for gunning down a man in the parking lot of the Stadium Promenade in Orange during a drug transaction that went bad.
Trevor Lee Brockington was sentenced Friday, following his Oct. 24 guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter with a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a firearm.
Brockington was charged in May 2017 with murder and faced a life sentence if convicted at trial.
According to testimony at his preliminary hearing, Brockington shot 34- year-old Patrick Sanyeah of Philadelphia in the buttocks while the victim was trying to run away.
Brockington had arranged to meet Sanyeah, who was with a friend at the time, at the shopping center to sell the victim marijuana, according to the testimony. But a dispute of some kind arose during the transaction, triggering the shooting, according to police.
Police were called at 6:11 p.m. May 12, 2017, on a report of shots fired in the parking lot of the center in the 1500 block of West Katella Avenue, where they found the victim, according to police.
Sanyeah -- whose 4-year-old son, Patrick, died in a 2014 fire in Philadelphia -- died at a hospital.
Sanyeah's fiancee, Sally Nyomah, said in a victim impact statement at Friday's sentencing that the victim was her ``best friend, lover, confidant, and the father to my children.''
Sanyeah and Nyomah raised ``three beautiful boys together, two of which we shared,'' she said.
The couple had plans to take their children to Disney World when he returned home from California, Nyomah said.
``The crime has devastated me and my family tremendously,'' Nyomah said. ``When it first happened, my youngest son, 2 at the time, would cry constantly throughout the day and his brother would cry himself to sleep every night. Two of my children were born in June, having to experience their birthdays without their father that year was so overwhelmingly painful.''
The victim's family also wrote a victim impact statement, saying, ``We lost a good and caring member who was the backbone for our family, always there to help and assist others.''