ROCKVILLE, Md. — A maximum sentence was handed down Friday in a horrifying Montgomery County double murder.
Two teen victims were lured on Snapchat to a dead-end street in Montgomery Village on the night before their high school graduation two years ago. The boys were ambushed and pumped full of bullets.
The judge handed Roger Garcia, 22, a century behind bars for two counts of second-degree murder and two gun charges. Garcia was the last of four killers to be sentenced.
"He slaughtered these boys over a fistful of marijuana," Circuit Judge David Boynton said.
A jury found three other defendants -- Jose Canales-Yanez, Rony Galicia and Garcia’s brother, Edgar Garcia Gaona -- guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. But Judge Boynton said, despite getting the lesser second-degree conviction, Garcia "was the lynch pin between these boys living and dying."
It was Garcia who convinced victims Shadi Najjar, 17, and Artem Ziberov, 18, to meet their killers on the pretense of buying Najjar's extra graduation ceremony ticket.
Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy said the killers fired 30 shots in seven seconds into the car where Najjar and Ziberov were waiting.
Prosecutors called the crime so violent and gratuitous -- and Garcia so lacking in conscience, empathy or remorse -- that only the maximum 100 years would provide a measure of justice to the victims.
Police said the killers were out for revenge for a minor pot deal with Najjar that went bad six months earlier. Prosecutors said Ziberov was just an innocent bystander.
"I can tell you time will never heal," Najjar's father Adi said after the sentencing. "We're going to remember our boy until the day we die."
Garcia's mother, sister and lawyer pleaded for mercy -- for a sentence closer to 40 years. They said he'd been sexually abused by his middle school English teacher and suffered from debilitating epilepsy.
McCarthy got maximum sentences against all four killers. The judge sentenced the other three defendants to life in prison with no chance of parole.