A Ramsey County judge on Friday sentenced a Las Vegas man to 29 years in prison for his role in the 2021 mass shooting at a downtown St. Paul bar that left one woman dead and injured 14 others.
More than a dozen family and friends clad in orange shirts honoring the slain Marquisha "Kiki" Wiley celebrated the sentence imposed on Devondre Trevon Phillips. Phillips, 31, fired the first shots that touched off a brief but chaotic gun battle inside the crowded Seventh Street Truck Park bar just after midnight on Oct. 10, 2021.
"We can only dream of the missing pieces of what our Kiki's life would've been," her mother, Beth Wiley, told the courtroom before Judge Carolina Lamas handed down the sentence. Wiley and others wore shirts depicting the 27-year-old veterinary technician holding a sign that read, "No more silence, end gun violence."
Phillips was convicted by a jury in February of eight counts of attempted second-degree murder. On Friday, Lamas ordered several of those counts to be served consecutively over the objections of Phillips' attorney, John Lesch.
Phillips, a St. Paul native, had just returned from Las Vegas the night of the shooting after previously leaving Minnesota amid a long-running dispute with Terry Lorenzo Brown, who dated Phillips' cousin.
Phillips purchased a pistol outside the bar and later fired the first two shots into Jeffrey Hoffman — an associate of Brown's — while about 100 young men and women danced to mainstream hip-hop played by DJ Peter Parker.
Phillips and Brown exchanged gunfire, striking each other and a dozen bystanders, as Phillips left the bar. Phillips was shot five times, suffering a broken femur and a severed artery in his leg. Brown fired the shot that killed Wiley and was convicted by a jury this month of murder and other charges. He still is awaiting sentencing.
Lesch argued that Phillips acted in self defense, but Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Treye Kettwick contended Phillips positioned himself as an aggressor who intended to kill his enemies that night.