An 18-year-old defendant was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for a double-fatal shooting of teenage brothers in Lakewood.
Marqueil Banks, 18, shot Damian Wikoff and Dillon Wikoff, 18 and 17 respectively, in 2020 in a robbery involving the selling of firearms, according to the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office. Banks, a 16-year-old at the time of the shooting, was convicted in March as an adult by a Jefferson County jury of first-degree murder. His sentence includes the possibility of parole after 40 years in prison.
On Aug. 23, 2020, Damien and Dillon arranged to sell a “homemade ghost gun” assembled from a kit purchased online, according to a DA’s office news release. Instead, a co-defendant, Michael Mendoza, now 20, recruited a group of juveniles to rob the pair. During the robbery, the brothers were shot by Banks.
Banks is the last of four defendants to be sentenced in the case.
Mendoza, who was 17 at the time of the shooting, pled guilty, as an adult on Jan. 31, 2022, to aggravated manslaughter and manslaughter. He was sentenced on April 27 to 20 years in prison as part of a plea bargain.
In May of 2021, a juvenile in the case, 15 at the time of the incident, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery and was sentenced to two years of juvenile supervised probation.
In April of 2022, another juvenile in the case, 15 at the time of the crime, pled guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to four years in the Department of Youth Services.
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