A sociopathic, cocaine-addicted murderer was slammed with a 95-years-to-life in a dramatic Queens sentencing Thursday, as the families of his three victims — two of whom were shot on a crowded Q111 bus — raged against him.
“I wish my father would die in hell!” the 12-year-old son of killer Damel Burton, 34, said. “He gave my mother a child and he took another away,” the boy, Amel, said outside court of victim Keith Murrell, 18.
“Keith was like a father to me,” the child cried.
“Look at me!” Murrell’s mom begged as Burton was sentenced in the 2011 rampage. “Look this way!” shouted the mom, Sheena Tucker, who had been Burton’s girlfriend before he shot her son once in the chest in her Foch Boulevard apartment on a December day two years ago.
The teen, targeted as payback after having brawled with Burton earlier in the year, would flee to his room, close the door and then jump from the second-story window — but even as he lay dying, Burton carried his 9mm semi-automatic aboard a Q111 bus, bent on still more revenge. There, firing through the pocket of his coat as the bus rolled forward, Burton sent a fatal bullet into the back of the head of Marvin Gilkes, 36, and shot Jojuan Lipsey, now 31, in the face, paralyzing him.
Gilkes was killed instantly, even before the bus came to a stop on Archer Avenue and Parsons Boulevard, where a crowd of commuters disembarked in terror.
“Marvin was my husband and my best friend. I trust in God to make a special place in hell for you,” said Gilkes’ heartbroken wife, Alisia who requested Burton be placed in solitary confinement “so you don’t have to worry about anyone following you.”
Prosecutor, Daniel Saunders called Burton’s wrath an act of “terrorism,” saying he “shattered the belief that if you sit on the bus and mind your business no one will bother you.”
The madman continued to shoot even before the bus came to a stop on Archer Avenue and Parsons Boulevard, where the crowded bus emptied.
“Because of you, justice will never be served for our families,” said Lipsey’s ex-wife, Tanika, during a victim impact statement in which she thoroughly explained to an unremorseful Burton the severe damage a bullet to her husband’s mouth and face had caused.
Burton’s insanity defense failed after a Queens jury didn’t buy that he suffered from paranoid delusions and convicted him of two murder counts, attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon.
“The defendant is an explosive, fiendish individual who needs to be removed from society like a cancer,” said Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter before imposing the lengthy sentence.
The ex-con is currently awaiting trial for an attempted murder case in Brooklyn, in which he was caught on camera shooting another innocent man in broad daylight days before the bus shooting.