Standing before U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, the federal prosecutor said the sentence the government was seeking for David Warren was about the average nationwide for people convicted of first-degree murder.

But Warren, Bredar responded, was hardly the average defendant.

The 32-year-old Black Guerrilla Family hit man had been involved in the killings of not one, not two, but three people. And unlike cases that often come before the federal courts involving gang and drug war disputes, the victims were involved in no such matters.

Bryan McKemy, 27, was simply a contractor working on a gang rival’s Northeast Baltimore home when it was shot up. Chanette Neal, 43, and Justice Allen, 21, meanwhile, were the mother and sister of a rival, executed in their West Baltimore home when Warren and others failed to lure their target there. Warren’s plea acknowledged another 10 nonfatal shootings.

The case was years in the making, bringing together seemingly disparate incidents of violence that had grabbed headlines for years and which involved the efforts of city police, the FBI, the ATF and other neighboring jurisdictions.

“I understand the court’s question: How can we recommend 33 years?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kim Hagan said of the sentence recommendation that had been worked out with Warren’s defense team.

In a rare move, Bredar shrugged off the recommendation, handing down a sentence of 45 years. It was still below the sentencing guidelines’ suggestion of life without parole, which family members of the victims had urged him to impose.

“Those two queens did not deserve what that monster did,” Samantha Boyd Lide, Neal’s sister and Allen’s aunt, told the judge. “He is a menace to society. He don’t ever need to be on the street again.”

“The rest of us have been sentenced to a life sentence of grief,” said Bryan McKemy’s father, Scott, looking back at other victims’ relatives seated in the gallery, who cheered in approval.

Warren said nothing when given the chance to address Bredar.

Warren was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of racketeering in December 2022, along with Davante Harrison, a once-promising rapper known as YGG Tay, and others. Both Warren and Harrison had already been convicted of other lesser crimes and were incarcerated when the indictments were handed up.

But the case wasn’t simply about taking the men off the street. It was about bringing justice to the victims’ families, and nailing down leads that had gone cold, retired Baltimore Police Sgt. Joseph Landsman said in an interview.

“It was like so many different areas that had people bringing small pieces that had this case come together,” said Landsman, who was a member of an FBI task force that investigated the case. “It made Baltimore seem so much smaller and connected.”

By age 24, and starting when he was 15, Warren had collected 10 different attempted murder charges and a murder conspiracy charge across separate cases in state court, all of which were dropped or saw him acquitted by a jury. In 2013, he pleaded guilty to an armed robbery charge and received 15 years in prison, with all but five years of that term suspended.

Landsman said that Warren had been taken under the wing of Ricky Evans, a Black Guerrilla Family leader. They participated in gang meetings at the Safe Streets anti-violence program in East Baltimore, utilizing it as a “de facto” clubhouse, according to Warren’s plea agreement.

Evans “was a BGF higher-up, who groomed Warren to be this nasty, violent guy,” Landsman said. “And he [Warren] was doing the exact same thing: He had these younger underlings doing all the shit for him.” Evans has pleaded guilty in a separate federal case brought in 2017, but has yet to be sentenced, court records show.

Warren was released from jail in the fall of 2017, and in early 2018 linked up with Harrison, the rapper, who “solicited Warren’s services as a hitman to target his rivals,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. Harrison bragged on Instagram that he had “just signed the top shooter in the city to a deal.”

“Months of horrific bloodshed followed,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.

Harrison wanted Warren to take out three rivals — one of them a BGF member who had burglarized his home years earlier, and two others who had taken to Instagram to make accusations that Harrison was cooperating with law enforcement. After shooting up the car of the rival BGF member in February 2018, Warren sent a text message that read: “Job √”

Then in April, Warren and an unindicted co-conspirator went to the home of one of the men who had accused Harrison of snitching, demanding that his mother and sister call him and summon him to the home. He didn’t pick up, and the two women were executed.

A 16-year-old relative of Neal and Allen addressed the court at the sentencing hearing and said she has had to undergo counseling and remains traumatized by the loss of her family members.

“I was 12 [at the time], looking over my shoulder every day,” she said. “I never knew if I was next.”

Among the other cases that Warren admitted as part of his plea was a quintuple shooting that occurred at a barbeque in 2016. Warren had been acquitted by a jury of the shootings at the time.

Such complex racketeering cases, encompassing a wide range of incidents and defendants, have long been a hallmark of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But with the resolution of Warren’s case, there are few if any such pending cases. They also take far more time and resources, and oftentimes a suspect can be removed from the street with a lesser case.

Landsman, the retired FBI task force officer, said he believes that is only a temporary fix.

“Cases like this are why the hell you get into law enforcement,” Landsman said.

Before federal prosecutors could address the court, Bredar made clear that he was concerned by the sentencing recommendation. He asked Hagan, the prosecutor, to explain how the process worked for the benefit of those in the audience.

Hagan noted that the case involved years-old allegations, some of which might not stand up to scrutiny individually in court. She said they were using the racketeering statute to “close cases that have been languishing” and achieve closure “that might not otherwise come.”

Warren’s guilty plea had avoided a trial where witnesses and government cooperators would have to be revealed and testify against Harrison in open court, putting them at risk. The sentence recommendation credited him for not putting witnesses through that process, she said.

Bredar said he recognized that in the “marketplace” of the federal courts, an agreement worked out by the prosecution and defense was generally accepted by judges, and that if they weren’t, they would “lose their currency, their value in the process of how cases are resolved.”

But Bredar repeatedly said Warren’s conduct was “extreme,” and that he was a “clear and present danger to the public.”

The 45-year sentence included credit for time Warren has been serving for a 2018 Baltimore County case.

Scott McKemy said he felt he had not been heard when he spoke at the earlier sentencing for the man who pulled the trigger in his son’s killing, Wayne Prince. Prince, whose plea did not include any other acts of violence, had received 28 years, and surely Warren should get much more.

Outside the courthouse afterward, McKemy said the higher sentence brought some solace: “A little bit of justice was served today.”

The family of Neal and Allen said they felt similarly. “He has to answer to God, not to man, and not to us, but to the Lord,” said Neal’s mother, Dolly Boyd.