A 19-year-old has pleaded guilty to the Roxborough High shooting that left one teen dead, four others injured
Zyhied Jones, 19, admitted to killing Nicolas Elizalde outside of a football scrimmage in September 2022, and killing another teen the day before.
A 19-year-old on Wednesday pleaded guilty to killing two teens in two days in 2022 — including shooting a barrage of bullets into a crowd of students outside Roxborough High School, killing a 14-year-old and wounding four other teens.
Zyhied Jones, who was 17 at the time of the shooting, admitted that he was one of five people who fired more than 60 rounds into a group of Roxborough High football players as they left the field after a scrimmage on Sept. 27, 2022.
Jones and the other shooters were targeting a 17-year-old who had attended the game when they opened fire toward the students walking to the locker room, prosecutors said. Their target was shot multiple times, but survived — and four other teen bystanders were also hit.
One of the stray bullets struck Nicolas Elizalde, a freshman at nearby Walter B. Saul High School, in the chest. He died within minutes, in the arms of his mother, Meredith, who ran to his side after hearing the shots. Nicolas was her only child.
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For that shooting, Jones pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, four counts of attempted murder, conspiracy, and gun crimes.
Jones is the first of the five people charged in the shooting — four of them were juveniles — to plead guilty. A sixth person involved in the crime, the getaway driver, remains unidentified, said Assistant District Attorney Ashley Toczylowski. The shooters have not cooperated with the investigation, she said in court Wednesday.
Jones is among three of the teens in the case also charged with killing 19-year-old Tahmir Jones the day before. Police said Zyhied Jones, alongside Dayron Burney-Thorn, 16, and Troy Fletcher, 15, shot Tahmir Jones more than 10 times outside his North Philadelphia home on Sept. 26, 2022. (The two Joneses are not related, police said.)
For that, Zyhied Jones pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, conspiracy, and gun crimes.
Detectives linked Zyhied Jones to the Roxborough shooting after recovering the getaway car and downloading the vehicle’s digital infotainment system, which showed phones that had recently been linked to its Bluetooth system. They also recovered a marijuana wrapper at the scene with Jones’ DNA on it, Toczylowski said.
The cell-phone data was damning, she said, and showed that his phone traveled the exact path of the getaway car before and after the shooting.
Ballistic evidence recovered at the scene was later found to be a match for the cartridge casings found near where Tahmir Jones was killed the day before, Toczylowski said. Surveillance video of that shooting showed a young man resembling Zyhied Jones, she said, and police recovered the sneakers he wore during the crime during a search of his home.
On Wednesday, Jones stood before Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott and said he was guilty of each of the 14 crimes — offenses that she told him carry a combined sentence of more than 300 years in prison.
“You’re pleading guilty because, in fact, that is what you did?” McDermott asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Nicolas Elizalde’s mother, Meredith, was not present at the hearing because she recently moved to Montana to begin a new phase of her life.
After the plea on Wednesday, Elizalde’s grandmother, Marge LaRue, sat in the quiet of the hallway outside the courtroom.
“I watch him, and he’s so young. He changed so much in seconds,” she said of Jones. “Everything was ruined in seconds for so many people.”
“I don’t believe in capital punishment, or even in juveniles in adult placement,” she said. “But I just think, oh, my God. What did you do?”
Jones, and all of the shooters, she said, will have birthdays in jail. Their hair will gray with age, and they will become old men.
» READ MORE: The mother of Roxborough shooting victim Nicolas Elizalde, 14, has a message: ‘He isn’t a number’
“Nicolas will have no more birthdays,” she said. “Nicolas will not become an old man. Heck, he was not even a man.”
Jones is scheduled to be sentenced in December. The four other accused shooters — Burney-Thorn and Fletcher, as well as Saleem Miller, now 18, and Yaaseen Bivens, now 23 — are expected back in court in late October to determine whether they, too, will accept prosecutors’ offer and plead guilty, or take their cases to trial.