2 men plead guilty to manslaughter in 2018 Roxbury slaying

Local News

“I carried him, raised him, loved him, and dreamed of seeing him grow old,” the victim’s mother wrote in a statement read aloud in court.

Two men pleaded guilty to manslaughter Monday in the 2018 killing of a Revere father, bringing a seven-year-long legal saga to a close after two previous trials ended with hung juries.

“The day Alexander was killed, my heart was shattered beyond repair. … I carried him, raised him, loved him, and dreamed of seeing him grow old,” Akeha Kimbrough, the mother of Alexander Mervin, wrote in a victim impact statement that was read aloud in court before her son’s killers were sentenced.

Jerion Moore, of Stoughton, and Nicholas Sicellon, of Dorchester, pleaded guilty Monday to voluntary manslaughter and carrying a firearm without a license in Mervin’s killing. 

Mervin, a 22-year-old Revere resident, was cleaning out his car in a parking lot on Roxbury’s Whittier Street in January of 2018 when Moore and Sicellon shot him, according to the office of Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden. Mervin ran across the street to Boston Police Headquarters, then was brought to Boston Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, prosecutors said. He was shot multiple times, Hayden’s office said, and ballistic evidence indicated that two guns were used. 

Mervin left behind a young daughter, two brothers to whom he was “devoted,” and a niece who never got to meet him, his mother said in her statement.

“His little girl will grow up without ever knowing the warmth of her father’s hugs, without hearing him say ‘I love you,’” she wrote. “The ripple effect of this loss reached every part of our family. The people who did this took more than a life — they took our family’s future.”

Video surveillance footage and cell phone evidence indicated that Moore and Sicellon were in the vicinity at the time Mervin was shot, prosecutors said.

The two defendants, now both 26, faced trials in 2021 and 2022; both ended in mistrials after jury members reported being deadlocked, court records show. 

On Tuesday, Judge Mary Ames sentenced Moore and Sicellon to 15 years in state prison. Moore was sentenced to two years for the gun charge while Sicellon received two and a half years for the same charge; those sentences were deemed to have already been served. The pair have already spent more than seven years behind bars.

Moore and Sicellon were initially charged with first degree murder, which carries an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole.

Kimbrough said she supported a long sentence.

“A lifetime in prison will never bring my son back, but it would bring a measure of peace knowing that those responsible can never harm another family the way they have harmed ours,” she wrote.