Old charges dismissed against two accused in cookout slayings

PITTSBURGH » A Pennsylvania judge has dismissed drug and weapons charges stemming from a 2013 case against two men who were later charged in an ambush at a cookout that killed five adults and an unborn child last year.

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge David Cashman on Monday granted a dismissal request from defense attorneys for 29-year-old Cheron Shelton and 27-yearold Robert Thomas along with a third defendant in the drug case, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Defense attorneys praised the ruling and reasserted their clients’ innocence in the March 2016 killings in the Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkinsburg, in which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

The defendants original were charged in connection with heroin and stolen weapons allegedly found at a Wilkinsburg home in February 2013, but the charges were dismissed the following month and again in July 2013 but were refiled in April 2016 as county homicide investigators worked to solve the slayings. Defense attorneys objected, arguing that the refiled charges were a pretext to take Shelton and Thomas into custody because they had been identified as suspects in the homicide case.

The two defendants are each charged with six counts of criminal homicide in the killings. Prosecutors suspect that a man wounded in the gunfire had killed Shelton’s friend in 2013, and they have said they are looking for that man.