A man who was 17 when he shot two other teens on Geneva Avenue in 2011, killing one and leaving the other with life-altering injuries, was sentenced today to 14 to 17 years in state prison after he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office reports.
A Suffolk Superior Court jury had found Nyasani Watt guilty of first-degree murder in 2013, but in 2024, the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial because Watt’s attorney had fallen asleep repeatedly during the trial, at one point even snoring away.
Last Wednesday, as jury selection was about to begin in his retrial, Watt pleaded guilty to manslaughter, armed assault to murder and assault and battery causing serious bodily injury, the DA’s office reports.
Prosecutors said Watt and a pal, Sheldon Mattis, also a teen at the time, were members of a gang calling itself Flatline, which was under attack by other gangs, when Mattis rode his bicycle up Geneva Avenue looking for rival gang members and came across a 14-year-old outside a convenience store on Geneva Avenue near Levant Street whom he thought was with another gang.
He rode back down Levant to tell Mattis, who gave him a loaded gun, patted him on the back and sent him to gun down the kid. He spotted the kid now walking down Geneva with Jaivon Blake, 16, and opened fire, killing Blake and critically wounding the younger teen, prosecutors said.
