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October 04, 2005

The Scene of the Crime

(Above: Philadelphia police left behind gloves and the sheet they'd covered Derry's body with.)

Sam Derry was a short, friendly man who favored colorful shirts—walking courthouse hallways in button-down jerseys fit for a backyard barbecue.

During Sigel's first attempted murder trial, Derry showed up every day. "Don't you ever let me catch you looking at some other man," he cooed at Sigel's then-three-month-old daughter during an April 2004 court proceeding. "If I ever catch you cheatin' on me, you're gonna pack your bags and get out."

In the same manner that Sigel's mother showed up to support her son, Derry seemed to show up to support her.

Once, after testifying on her son's behalf at a federal sentencing hearing, Michelle Brown-Derry looked pained and wiped out. "Man," she said of her son. "If he even think about having a negative thought—"

"Hey," Derry interrupted her. "You just look in his eyes, you can see—he knows he's been blessed."

The 46-year-old Derry's seeming gregariousness makes the horror of how he was killed all the worse: shot to death, driven to an alley in the 8100 block of Forrest Avenue in the Cedarbrook section of Philadelphia, and set aflame.

Whoever killed Derry took their time setting up the scene where his body was ultimately found.

They used fallen tree limbs, including a small uprooted tree, to make a funeral pyre on which to set his body. The entire tableau smacks of a gangland killing. As one law enforcement official told PW earlier today, “This is a message murder. This is the kind of murder the mafia does, where they shoot you in the face as a sign of disrespect. So your mother can’t have an open casket.”

Or as another woman who stood outside this evening looking over the charred remains of the pyre put it, "This is cold. This is some Jamaican shit."

Posted by steve at October 4, 2005 10:38 PM

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