Philly has a gun problem. Straw buying makes it worse.

An Inquirer review showed how nearly 900 guns ended up in circulation.

As soon as Daniel Lucas turned 21, he spent three months traveling 1,700 miles to gun shops in eight counties around Philadelphia to buy a total of 36 handguns for people who couldn’t buy firearms themselves.

Devon Williams, 28, wanted a new gun, but he was barred from buying one because he was a fugitive wanted for murder. So he drove with his girlfriend to the Allentown Gun Show, court records say, where he approached a seller’s table, told his girlfriend which .22-caliber handgun he liked, then handed her a wad of cash to complete the purchase.

And 21-year-old Jayden Scott, who wasn’t eligible to buy a gun because of a previous forgery conviction, asked a friend to buy him a 9mm handgun. Ten days later, court records say, someone came to Scott’s home, stole the firearm, and used it to fatally shoot Scott outside his bedroom.

As the numbers of shootings and homicides have reached record heights in Philadelphia over the last several years, law enforcement officials across the region have warned about what they view as a notable contributor to the flood of illegal guns on the streets:

Straw purchasing, the term used when someone buys a gun and then gives or sells it to people barred from buying it themselves.

The method is just one avenue by which firearms — millions of which are legally sold every year — can end up becoming crime guns. People also steal guns, buy them through illegal off-the-books sales on the streets, or build them through online ghost gun kits.

To understand what drives the illegal straw purchasing market, The Inquirer reviewed more than 135 court cases from the last three years in which people in the Philadelphia region were charged with gun trafficking or straw purchasing. Defendants typically faced charges including selling a gun to an ineligible person, providing false information about gun ownership, or making false statements during a purchase.

That review, along with interviews and data analysis, showed that defendants were accused of trying to put nearly 900 guns into circulation — mostly handguns, but also at least two dozen assault rifles.

At least a dozen of the weapons ended up in the hands of people who would go on to commit shootings and murders.

The review also turned up some common themes: About a third of the people charged were women, sometimes girlfriends or mothers of a person who could not legally buy a gun because of prior convictions.

Other straw buyers were looking to make a quick buck, selling firearms at a premium.

Most people charged were in their late 20s; the straw buyers sometimes purchased handguns for people under 21 — too young to buy one themselves.

In the suburbs, prosecutors hoping to stem the flow of illegal guns into and out of Philadelphia have become increasingly focused on groups of young men who have conducted coordinated buys.

And, perhaps most of all, The Inquirer’s reporting and analysis demonstrated a stark reality: Defendants in straw buying cases were the rare few who were actually caught.

Police and prosecutors say an untold number of straw buyers get away with the crime, in part because of Pennsylvania’s lax gun laws. There is no limit to the number of weapons someone can buy, no mandate to report a gun lost or stolen, and no requirement for firearms dealers about how or when to flag purchases as suspicious.

“We take thousands of guns off [the streets], and we know that people are buying guns by the thousands,” said William Fritze, head of the Gun Violence Task Force in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. “You’d need a massive amount of investigation power in order to do something … to see how many guns are actually going on the street that are straw purchases and are causing violence.”

Federal rules can also pose barriers for authorities. One example: Federal law requires dealers to report sales of two or more firearms to one buyer in a five-day period to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But straw buyers can easily outwit that measure by shopping at multiple stores.

Philadelphia officials for decades have tried to pass local gun laws, such as limits on monthly handgun purchases. But gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, have challenged those efforts through lawsuits, and state courts have routinely ruled against the city, often citing a concept known as preemption, which bans local governments from passing regulations that are stricter than state laws.

In 2020, Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration sued the state in another attempt to overturn preemption, but the Commonwealth Court rejected the attempt last year. The city has appealed to the state Supreme Court, where the case remains pending.

Pennsylvania lawmakers, meanwhile, have for years declined to act on various proposals that would make it harder for residents to buy firearms, which would impede straw buyers. Some state House Republicans who have blocked those measures said the answer to gun violence isn’t more gun control legislation — but more vigorous enforcement of existing laws against those who possess or use firearms illegally.

With so many guns already in circulation, even gun control advocates acknowledge that no single change is likely to solve the city’s violence crisis. Still, in the meantime, law enforcement is spending significant resources trying to build straw purchasing cases in a system that can make the crime difficult to detect and punish.

“There’s such a large amount of guns to begin with,” Fritze said, “it’s hard to quantify how big of a problem straw purchasing is, because we just don’t catch everyone.”

High-volume purchasers

Daniel Lucas was one of those who got caught.

Before July 2020, Lucas, an only child from Cobbs Creek, had no criminal record. He was studying speech pathology at the Community College of Philadelphia, and was known on his block as the “goody two-shoes,” friends and family said.

But that month, according to court records, Lucas began a three-month shopping spree that netted him 36 handguns. The allure, he said, was the promise of easy cash.

It started when Lucas was in Georgia celebrating his 21st birthday with friends. One of the friends, he said, handed him a phone and said another man wanted to talk with him.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, man, I see you just turned 21,’”' Lucas recalled in an interview. “‘I need a favor from you, you wanna make some extra money?’”

Lucas was intrigued.

All Lucas had to do, he said, was ride with the man to a gun shop, hand the clerk the cash and sign the paperwork — a 15-minute process — then hand over the gun. In exchange, Lucas would earn about $150, or get a few ounces of free weed.

At the time, Lucas said, he was depressed over a recent breakup, angry at his absent adoptive father, with whom he was trying to reconnect, and drinking and smoking marijuana heavily. And the money would help with school.

So he agreed.

Once Lucas was back in Philadelphia, the man he spoke with on the phone — whom Lucas declined to identify and who was never caught by police — picked him up and took him to Mount Joy, Lancaster County, where Lucas bought four identical Taurus 9mm handguns at the same store. That type of transaction is legal in Pennsylvania, which, unlike New Jersey and other states, does not limit how many firearms a buyer can take home at once.

Lucas didn’t slow down after that. In one week, he bought 14 handguns, and on some days made multiple purchases at different stores.

He visited gun shops in eight Pennsylvania counties: Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Berks, Schuylkill, and Lancaster, court records say, patronizing small family-owned businesses and such large outdoor sports chain stores as Cabela’s.

Each time, Lucas said, he’d get picked up in a car by the man and sometimes as many as four others. They’d meet him at school or his West Philly home, where he lived with his mother.

“I didn’t want to do it anymore but there was a fear that, if I stop right now, am I going to be hurt?” he said. “They knew where I lived.”

So he continued — and tried not to think about where the guns would end up. He said he earned a few ounces of free weed and about $4,000 in all.

Lucas aroused enough suspicion to be denied a sale only once: in July 2020, when a clerk at Target Shooting Solutions, in Avondale, Chester County, turned him away. The clerk called state police, and later told detectives that Lucas had driven from Philadelphia the day before to buy a Glock handgun, and that it struck him as odd to make the same 35-mile drive the following day to buy another gun.

Even so, Lucas’ shopping spree continued for weeks. It wasn’t until September that detectives in Montgomery County began reviewing his string of purchases. Relying on records of sales that gun shops must submit to the state police and ATF, investigators found what they considered to be a glaring pattern of straw buying: dozens of guns, purchased day after day, at shops hundreds of miles away from each other.

He bought at least two guns on 12 different occasions, court records say. And he appeared to have a favorite make and model: the Taurus G2C 9mm semiautomatic handgun, which he bought six times.

“I have never heard of anyone owning six of the same exact manufacturer, model, and caliber of firearms, neither professionally nor personally, ever,” Detective Mark Minzola, a 33-year veteran, later wrote in court documents filed in Lucas’ case.

Investigators finally caught up with Lucas in October 2020, when he was charged in connection with a burglary of student housing at West Chester University, court records say.

A month after that, Montgomery County authorities charged him with 266 offenses connected to his series of straw buys, including operating a corrupt organization, dealing in the proceeds of unlawful activities, and making materially false statements.

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said his office is committed to pursuing straw buyers, and when prosecutors “get to put a sentencing on where we outline all of the carnage that they’ve caused, they’re gonna have a lot of time in jail to think about that.”

Lucas pleaded guilty in December 2022.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he told Montgomery County Municipal Court Judge Wendy Rothstein, through tears, at his sentencing last month. “I take full accountability for what I did.”

Only nine of his 36 crime guns have been recovered by police — mostly during traffic stops, said Assistant District Attorney Scott Frame, who prosecuted the case. One has been linked to a shooting, he said, and another was found in the possession of a teenager.

“Yes, he was targeted,” Frame said of Lucas, “but he’s not 100% a victim here.”

From the bench, Rothstein told Lucas he contributed to a “major problem” in the community. “We do not know how many crimes were committed with those guns, nor will we ever know.”

But she said Lucas was emblematic of a trend of young people being targeted by bad actors to buy guns. She sentenced him to at least 10 years in prison, and said she believed he could turn his life around.

As police led Lucas out of the courtroom, he hugged his mother.

“It’s alright, Mom,” he told her. “I’m gonna be OK. I’m gonna be better.”

“He was naive,” Bernadette Lucas said of her son. “These kids don’t know. And I don’t want any other children to be involved in this.”

Straw buyers under pressure

Sometimes buyers have significant issues prohibiting their purchases — so they seek to exploit people close to them.

In February 2021, state agents monitoring the Allentown Gun Show observed Devon Williams, 28, and his girlfriend, Danaira Jones, 28, walk up to Stars and Stripes Tactical Gear’s table of guns.

Williams, at that point, was facing third-degree murder charges in the fatal shooting of a man in East Germantown a year earlier. He had been released on house arrest to await his trial, then cut off his ankle monitor and went on the lam.

At the gun show, he pointed to a .22-caliber Mossberg 715P sporting pistol, according to court records, then took cash out of his pocket, counted it, and handed it to Jones. Jones gave the money to the seller and filled out the purchasing paperwork in her name, and the Stars and Stripes employee handed her a box containing the black pistol. The records don’t make clear whether the seller noticed the cash exchange between the two.

Afterward, Jones left the dealer’s table and handed the box to Williams, and they headed to the parking lot together.

Law enforcement continued to look into the pair and discovered Williams’ status as a fugitive.

The next month, Philadelphia police visited Jones’ house, and she admitted buying the gun for Williams, who was upstairs. Detectives seized the pistol, and the two were taken into custody — Williams for his murder case, Jones to be charged for straw purchasing.

Williams went on to plead guilty to counts including third-degree murder and was sentenced last spring to 10 to 20 years in prison, court records show.

Jones, meanwhile, faces a bench trial in June. She told detectives she didn’t know Williams was wanted for murder, and didn’t know he couldn’t buy the gun himself, court documents say. Her lawyer said she maintains her innocence and will fight the charges, contending that she was pressured into the act by Williams.

Fritze, while not commenting explicitly on Jones’ case, said prohibited buyers often seek to exploit people with vulnerabilities when recruiting straw purchasers, targeting wives or girlfriends, or friends or relatives struggling for money.

“We would think the strong-willed person is going to say, ‘No, I’m not going to buy a gun for you,’” he said. For those pressured into straw purchasing, “it’s the opposite of that.”

Quick time-to-crime

Once a gun is on the streets of Philadelphia, it can change hands quickly, and end up being used to commit a violent crime. Jayden Scott’s case is an example.

In fall 2020, court records say, Scott asked a friend, Denzel Johnson, 26, to buy a gun for him. Scott, who had a forgery conviction, couldn’t buy it himself.

Scott, 21, lived with his mother in East Mount Airy, and knew she wouldn’t approve of his having a firearm in the house. So he kept the weapon hidden in his room.

In October 2020 — 10 days after Johnson bought Scott the gun — someone came over to Scott’s house while he was home alone, took the gun from him, and fatally shot him with it, police said.

When his mother, Anastacia Scott-Coates, who works at a hotel, came back to the house, she found him dead on the second floor. Scott-Coates still isn’t sure why her son bought the gun, but remains devastated that he felt the need to have one — and wonders whether he’d be alive if he hadn’t.

“Your home is your safe space,” Scott-Coates, 43, said in a recent interview, fighting back tears. “I didn’t know what could’ve transpired.”

A few days after Scott’s killing, his mother found an empty box under his bed containing a purchase receipt for the gun with Johnson’s name on it. She gave it to police.

A few weeks later, during a traffic stop, officers recovered the gun from a man who wasn’t eligible to have a firearm.

Police haven’t been able to prove that this suspect pulled the trigger and shot Scott. Scott’s mother said detectives told her there was not enough evidence yet to definitively link anyone to the slaying.

Johnson, the man who bought the gun for Scott, pleaded guilty last year to crimes including straw purchasing. He received five years’ probation.

Scott-Coates and her family remain devastated by Scott’s death, she said. He was a rambunctious child who grew up reading comics and the Hardy Boys, and as a young man began recording rap videos. She said she can’t watch them anymore because it’s too painful to hear his voice.

Scott-Coates said she’s frustrated that Scott bought a gun in the first place, and wants someone to be charged in his killing. In the meantime, she said, she hates turning on the news and hearing constant reports of violence — and the apparent ease with which people seem to be able to obtain and use firearms.

“Why was it so easy?” she asked. “I’m not the only one suffering because of this.”