A 20-year-old Grain Valley man was sentenced to 18 years in prison this week for his role in setting up a robbery that turned deadly in Kansas City’s Pendleton Heights neighborhood two years ago, closing out the final chapter of a case that has now sent three young men to prison. Jackson County Judge Joel P. Fahnestock handed down the sentence to Robert L. Spears, who pleaded guilty last month to accessory second-degree murder, armed criminal action, and accessory first-degree assault.
Spears’s sentence breaks down to 15 years on the murder conviction, three years on the armed criminal action count, and 10 years on the assault charge, according to the Kansas City Star. The murder and weapon sentences were ordered to run consecutively, while the assault sentence runs concurrently with the other two — a structure required in part by Missouri law, which mandates that armed criminal action convictions carry a minimum three-year term that must be stacked onto the underlying felony sentence rather than served alongside it, per the Revised Statutes of Missouri.
Spears had been scheduled to face a Jackson County jury on October 26, but his July 29 guilty plea resolved the case three months early, according to the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office. He had originally faced six felony counts when charged in August 2024, including accessory to second-degree murder, accessory to first-degree assault, accessory to unlawful use of a weapon, and three counts of armed criminal action; three of those charges — accessory unlawful use of a weapon and two armed criminal action counts — were dismissed as part of the plea deal, the Star reports.
How a $100 Weed Deal Turned Deadly
The case traces back to August 17, 2024, when Spears and 22-year-old David Crowell exchanged social-media messages about money Spears owed him, messages police described as non-aggressive. Spears then asked Crowell to bring marijuana priced at $100 and gave him an apartment building parking lot in the 300 block of Maple Boulevard as the meeting place, according to prosecutors…