After spending 24 years in prison on an overturned murder conviction, Shaurn Thomas received a $4.1m payout from the city of Philadelphia – and became a standard-bearer for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.
Now, seven years after his release, Thomas has admitted to killing a different man in early 2023 over a comparatively paltry $1,200 drug debt. And as a result, Thomas will probably go back to a cell for the rest of his life.
In another bizarre twist, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, Thomas, 50, met his victim through an association of former inmates who had their convictions overturned. A girlfriend whose brother was also wrongly imprisoned for murder introduced Thomas to a childhood friend, who took cocaine worth $1,200 from him to sell but failed to pay him the money.
Thomas shot and killed the man, 38-year-old Akeem Edwards, in January 2023. And on Thursday in Philadelphia, he pleaded guilty to charges including third-degree murder and weapons offenses. He will be sentenced in February.
According to the Inquirer, the common pleas court judge, Roxanne Covington, expressed incredulity that Thomas, a multimillionaire, would have committed murder for a relatively minor sum of money.
“Are these facts true?” she asked Thomas after prosecutors explained how he had tracked down Edwards in a Philadelphia neighborhood and shot him in cold blood before later allegedly saying to his girlfriend, Ketra Veasy, that he had previously been involved in at least three homicides.
“Yes, your honor,” Thomas replied, according to the newspaper. The Inquirer recounted how Thomas was originally found guilty of the 1990 robbery and murder of a north Philadelphia businessman and had his conviction overturned on appeal in 2017.
The Philadelphia district attorney’s office declined to retry that case after Thomas’s conviction was thrown out. But prosecutors also expressed doubt that Thomas was entirely innocent.
Members of Edwards’s family spoke out against Thomas after Thursday’s plea hearing. “There’s not enough time for them to possibly give him,” his sister, Tyeisha Marshall, said of Thomas, the Inquirer reported. She told the newspaper her brother was genuine and a loving father.
Sharondah King, the mother of Edwards’s child, criticized Veasy for her role in the crime, which included driving in the car with Thomas on the day her partner was murdered.
“If it wasn’t for her [introducing them], this would’ve never happened,” she said.
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