He killed 2 NC teenagers but may only spend 4 years in prison. Here’s why.
Three years after he sprayed bullets into an SUV of young people, killing two of them, a Durham man will spend seven to 10 years in prison, under a plea deal he took last month.
And with 1,105 days’ credit for time in the county jail, he could serve as little as four years for the two murders, according to sentencing paperwork.
Keon Rayquan Beal, 24, was originally charged with five counts of attempted murder and two counts of second-degree murder in the Dec. 13, 2021, shooting.
Isijah Carrington, 19, and Ariuna Cotton, 15, were killed and four children, ranging in age from 12 to 17, were injured, The News & Observer previously reported.
The killings sparked a strong response from the Durham community, including Police Chief Patrice Andrews, who condemned the shooting in a news conference that day.
“There is no room in our city for this type of violence,” she said. “It’s senseless. It’s beyond tragic. And lives are forever going to be changed.”
What happened
It was just after 3 a.m. when a stolen Hyundai SUV with seven adolescents inside crashed into a utility pole near Burton Magnet Elementary School that December day.
Carrington and Cotton were dead by the time first responders arrived; Carrington had been shot six times, while Cotton, a student at Hillside High School, was felled by a shot to the left ear, according to their autopsy reports.
The four injured victims’ names weren’t released by police due to their age, but Elijah Pryor, the father of a 17-year-old survivor, told WRAL his daughter was shot in the spine and would have to relearn how to walk. One child was not injured.
Casings from at least two different guns, including a .223-caliber rifle and a 9 mm handgun, were found at the scene, the autopsy reports state. Both victims were shot at least once with each type of gun, and a third, semi-automatic handgun was found in the SUV, according to the reports.
After escaping to Washington, D.C., Beal was arrested there April 9, 2022, and taken back to Durham. In his first court appearance, Assistant District Attorney Mary Jude Darrow said the shooting followed a dispute over a gun, The N&O reported.
Beal drove two others in a high-speed chase after the SUV, believing the gun was inside, Darrow said at the time. Beal then rear-ended the Hyundai, sending it into the pole.
“Gunshots spewed from the Equinox [driven by Beal], which traveled up the block, turned around and came back, firing another round of bullets, the prosecutor said,” The N&O reported.
Beal, who prosecutors said belonged to a gang tied to the Bloods, had previously been suspected in a 2020 incident where over 80 shots were fired into a building with four young people inside, according to The N&O’s report.
But Beal’s defense attorney challenged the prosecution’s claims, questioning how they validated his gang membership and stating he lived in Washington, D.C., only having returned to North Carolina to visit his child.
What the district attorney says
Beal was sentenced April 21 by Judge Josephine Davis, court records show. In exchange for his guilty plea to the second-degree murder charges, the five charges of attempted murder were dismissed, according to the sentencing document.
Victims’ family members could not be reached, except for one survivor’s father, who told The N&O he was not aware of the sentencing and had begged the District Attorney’s Office to take the case to trial.
Cotton’s grandmother died in March without seeing Beal sentenced, according to her obituary. But she’d told The N&O that her granddaughter, who lived with her after her mother’s death, aspired to be a singer or dancer and always spoke her mind. Cotton couldn’t wait for her 16th birthday that March, her grandmother said.
Court documents don’t explain Beal’s sentencing, though a sentencing chart provided by the District Attorney’s Office lists that sentence length as part of the mitigated range for second-degree murder — meaning there would have to be evidence of circumstances that could justify reducing a sentence.
District Attorney Satana Deberry has been criticized for light sentencing and poor communication with victims and their families. And it was Davis’ courtroom that a homicide victim’s family in an unrelated case stormed out of in March 2022 after a last-minute plea deal, The N&O reported then.
Under North Carolina law, crime victims and their families, if the victim is deceased, have the right to be notified before sentencings and plea deals. They also should have the opportunity to speak with the prosecutor about the case and provide a victim impact statement, as The N&O reported last month.
Deberry told The N&O that victims and their families were notified as much as possible before Beal’s sentencing. The family member who alleged he wasn’t notified had a disconnected phone number, but the surviving victims were cousins, so her office also tried to notify him through family, she said.
As for the dismissed attempted murder charges, Deberry said, that was part of Beal’s plea deal. Furthermore, witnesses were no longer able to testify in the case, and her office was never able to confirm a motive in the killings, according to Deberry.
“Certainly this case was very well-publicized when it happened, and any death of kids in our community is a loss that we hope to avoid in the future,” she said. “Mr. Beal assumed responsibility for it and is in prison, where he should be.”
NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@newsobserver.com
This story was originally published May 6, 2025 at 5:18 PM.
