By Mensah M. Dean
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — The life that Bilal Gay had lived up until the night he fatally shot a neighborhood rival in a recreation center on Jan. 18, 2008, was heartbreakingly sad.
On that night, Gay, who was 16, had already lived through the home-invasion murder of his mother, abuse at the hands of his father who is now incarcerated, more abuse in a foster home and had dropped out of a disciplinary high school in ninth grade.
Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Engel Temin yesterday cited the sorry circumstances of Gay’s life in sentencing him to seven to 20 years in state prison for voluntary manslaughter and weapon’s offenses.
The judge ordered that Gay’s sentences run concurrently rather than consecutively, as the prosecutor had recommended.
“We as a society did not take care of you,” the judge said referring to the years after Gay’s mother’s murder.
“We did not offer you the . . . care that you needed,” she added, “but you are getting it now.”
He had faced a maximum sentence of 16 to 32 years in prison after a jury convicted him on Aug. 28 of voluntary manslaughter, carrying a gun without a license and possessing an instrument of crime in the death of Charles “Frog” Trotman, 16.
The violence broke out inside the crowded Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center, at 22nd Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, where as many as 100 people had gathered to watch a basketball game.
During the trial, Gay said that he had tracked Trotman to the rec center to get the cell phone and the $20 that the victim had stolen from him at gunpoint 15 minutes earlier.
Gay testified that he opened fire when he thought the victim was reaching for a gun.
Assistant District Attorney Richard Sax maintained that there was no evidence that Trotman had robbed Gay, and no cell phone or money was found on his body.
“You are not a bad person, Mr. Gay, but you did a horrible, horrible thing,” the judge said.
With tears in his eyes and gravel in his voice, Gay turned in his chair to address the victim’s mother.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I was young.”
Copyright 2009 Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC