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A Salt Lake City man was sentenced to prison for up to life Friday after pleading guilty to a homicide and another charge his attorney said stemmed from his involvement in gangs from an early age.
As part of a plea agreement in two separate cases, 19-year-old Damian Antonio Garcia admitted to going with two friends to the Holladay apartment of 46-year-old Darrin Jackson at about 2:30 a.m. on May 21, 2016, to talk about a string of robberies in the area. Police said the apartment's occupants were members of a gang that rivals Garcia's.
Jonathan Jackson, Darrin Jackson's son, opened the door and was punched and hit in the face with a gun, according to charges.
Garcia admitted in court documents that after entering the apartment he took out a gun. He said that when he was hit with a pool stick, his gun fired, killing Darrin Jackson. Jonathan Jackson was shot in the hand during the episode.
Garcia, and co-defendants Joshua Nguyen, 22, and Keison Kuykendall, 19, were all charged with first-degree felony murder and other counts.
Garcia pleaded guilty last month to a lesser count of second-degree felony manslaughter.
"He went there and shouldn't have had the gun, obviously," Garcia's defense attorney, Neal Hamilton, said after sentencing on Friday. "That's why he plead [guilty] to it. He was completely reckless in what he did."
Kuykendall and Nguyen each have pleaded guilty to second-degree felony obstructing justice and are scheduled to be sentenced later this month.
On Friday, 3rd District Judge Royal Hansen sentenced Garcia to one to 15 years in prison on the manslaughter charge.
Hansen also sentenced Garcia to serve up to life in prison for an unrelated aggravated robbery charge, Hamilton said, which stemmed from a September 2015 episode.
In that case, Garcia said he was driving a car when a passenger took out a gun and told a man walking by the car outside an apartment complex in Millcreek to give him money. After getting $2,200 from the man, Garcia and the passenger took off.
Hamilton said Garcia had been raised in a gang lifestyle that he couldn't escape and asked Hansen for some leniency to give him a chance to change his life.
"People get in [prison] and get further entrenched in the gang lifestyle, even more than the outside," Hamilton said later Friday. "I asked for a concurrent sentence so that Damian could have a light at the end of the tunnel and have an incentive not to get further entrenched in this lifestyle that brought him here."
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