Sentence

Beats slay rap but gets 15 yrs. on gun charge

A MAN accused of gunning down a rival drug dealer in Queens in 2015 was acquitted of murder — but ended up with a 15-year sentence on a gun charge, officials said Saturday.

Shyron Kearse allegedly shot Troy Grant in the face at 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 2, 2015, after pounding on his door in the Pomonok Houses in Kew Gardens Hills.

“I heard people come up and knock on the door,” building resident Christian Orozco, 21, recalled of the shooting.

“Then there was a lot of fighting,” Orozco said. “I heard three to four gunshots and a woman screaming ‘Someone call the police!’”

“After I heard the shots, I just heard a bunch of people running down the stairs,” he said.

After the shooting, Kearse ran off, said police.

Grant, 34, died at the scene. The shooting was the first murder in Queens that year.

Neighbors who knew Grant put out a makeshift memorial for him outside the building.

“There were candles all around right after that,” Orozco said.

Roughly a month after Grant’s death, detectives from the 107th Precinct zeroed in on Kearse and charged him with murder and criminal possession of a weapon.

Detectives at the time believed Kearse and Grant were fighting over drug territory, law enforcement sources said.

Yet a jury disagreed with the murder charge. It found Kearse, 37, not guilty of the killing at his trial in March.

But the jury did convict Kearse of weapons possession.

Sources with knowledge of the case said prosecutors had no physical evidence like surveillance images or DNA to link Kearse (photo) to the crime, and relied solely on eyewitnesses.

One prosecution witness could not be located prior to trial, the source said. Last month, a judge sentenced Kearse to 15 years in prison — the maximum penalty for that charge. The minimum sentence is five years.

Kearse’s earliest release date will be in 2027, officials said.

“It’s pretty strange that he was found not guilty of murder, but not the weapons possession,” Kearse’s attorney David Cohen said Friday.

“I can’t tell you what swayed the jury because I didn’t speak to them.”

A spokeswoman from the Queens DA’s office confirmed the acquittal, but noted the weapons possession conviction and the hefty sentence.

Kearse plans to appeal. “He feels he was unjustly convicted (of the weapons charge) and given a significant sentence,” Cohen said.

This is not Kearse’s first stint in prison. In 2006, he was sentenced to a year in prison on an attempted weapons possession charge, court records show.