[chris]

Five people were sentenced in 2013 after a group looking for Semmie Shorter killed his girlfriend, Wilneice L. Green, 28, and her 13-year-old daughter, Ja'Brayasia, inside a house in Liberty Township, Ohio.

Two young callers phoned 911 from the house on Northgate Drive on the night of Nov. 15, 2009, telling a dispatcher that a woman and a girl had been shot. Liberty police found Green and Ja'Brayasia dead inside. Four other children who were in the home were not hurt.

Neither victim was the target. According to a Liberty police affidavit later filed in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, five people drove to the address that evening to kill Shorter, 38, Green's boyfriend, who lived there. Shorter was not home.

The day before, the mother of a teenage girl had gone to Liberty police accusing Shorter of sexual contact with her daughter at the Northgate Drive house, according to a police report. The girl was related to Denise L. Jackson, one of the five. The affidavit states that Jackson went to a co-defendant's home the next day and said Shorter had to "pay for what he did."

Prosecutors said Melvin L. Turner carried an AK-47 type rifle into the house and did the shooting. Green pleaded for her children before she was shot, according to the affidavit. Ja'Brayasia tried to run out the door, and Turner told another man in the group to shoot her. He did not, and Turner pushed the girl to the floor and shot her.

Five people were charged with aggravated murder in February 2010. Shorter was never charged. Liberty Police Chief Richard Tisone said his department had gathered evidence and planned to charge Shorter with gross sexual imposition, a fourth-degree felony, but Shorter shot himself in the head at his sister's Youngstown home that same week. He died in March 2010, according to the Mahoning County Coroner's Office.

Turner pleaded guilty to two counts of involuntary manslaughter and other charges and was sentenced to 19 years in February 2013. Assistant Trumbull County Prosecutor Chris Becker said the state had no physical evidence tying Turner to the killings and would have had to build a murder case on four co-defendants who had lied to police and to the grand jury. "It's not the outcome we would want," Becker said. He said investigators never established why Turner shot the two, adding, "We don't have a motive."

The rest of the group was sentenced over the following two months. Marquese J. Floyd, who supplied the rifle and got rid of it, received 22 years; the weapon is believed to have been dumped in McKelvey Lake in Youngstown and has never been found. Jackson received 13 years and Appollonia Baker, who drove the group to the house, received six. James Christian, the last of the five to be sentenced, got 18 years in April 2013.