Kaboni Savage ran a cocaine organization in North Philadelphia from the late 1990s and was convicted in 2013 of twelve murders committed or ordered between 1998 and 2004. Six of the dead were members of one family: two women and four children, killed on October 9, 2004, because a relative had agreed to cooperate with federal investigators. The other six were men aged 22 to 44, who died between 1998 and 2004. Prosecutors said Savage ordered seven of the twelve killings while already in federal custody.
The case was tried in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania before Judge R. Barclay Surrick. On May 13, 2013, after a week of deliberation, the jury found Savage guilty on every count. On May 31 it voted unanimously for death, and on June 3 the judge imposed thirteen death sentences. It was the first federal death sentence in the district since the penalty was reinstated in 1988. The Third Circuit affirmed in 2020 and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2021. On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the sentence, along with those of 36 other men, to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Savage denied any role in the killings.
Savage was about 38 when he was convicted in 2013, which puts his birth around 1974. At the penalty hearing, defense lawyers told the jury that his father died when Savage was 13, that he became the head of his family in the Hunting Park neighborhood of North Philadelphia, which was overrun by drugs and violence, and that an older drug trafficker became a mentor to him in his teens. He had also been a promising junior welterweight boxer before he turned to dealing cocaine.
The Third Circuit later summarized the course of his business in its opinion. He began by selling drugs for other people, was selling on his own by the early 1990s, and by the late 1990s was handling large quantities of cocaine. The organization that formed around him, which the court called the Kaboni Savage Organization, operated mainly in North Philadelphia. Federal prosecutors dated it from at least late 1997 to 2010. Two of his associates became central to what followed: a man who was his right-hand man in the early 2000s and who later became a government witness, and an enforcer, Lamont Lewis, who later pleaded guilty and testified against him.
Kenneth Lassiter, 44, of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, died in Philadelphia on March 19, 1998. He was a stranger to Savage. The jury later convicted Savage of his murder, the earliest of the twelve counts. Savage was 23 at the time of the first killing for which he was convicted.
In 2004 Savage was tried in a Pennsylvania state court over Lassiter's death and was found not guilty. The main eyewitness had died before the trial opened. That witness was Tybius Flowers.
Mansur Abdullah, 22, of Philadelphia, died on September 6, 2000. A man later identified as a member of the organization, who died before the federal prosecution began, was named with Savage in the indictment.
Carlton Brown, 27, of Philadelphia, died on September 13, 2001. The indictment attributed his death to Lewis. Savage was convicted of this death in the count added by the second superseding indictment of June 2011, which brought the number of murder counts against him to twelve.
Barry Parker, 32, of Philadelphia, died on February 26, 2003. Savage and Steven Northington were named as responsible for his death in the indictment, and the jury convicted both men of it.
Tyrone Toliver, 26, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, died on March 14, 2003. The indictment named Savage and the associate who has since died. The jury convicted Savage of the murder.
Tybius Flowers, 32, of Philadelphia, died on March 1, 2004, shortly before the state trial over Lassiter's death opened. Without his testimony the state prosecution failed. Savage and Northington were named in the indictment for this death, and the jury convicted both of it.
Savage was released from county custody in Philadelphia on April 8, 2004, after the state acquittal. Within a week federal authorities arrested him on drug trafficking and related charges. He was tried in federal court on those charges and convicted in 2005, together with Northington and three other defendants, and sentenced to 30 years. Federal investigators had recorded nearly 100 of his conversations while he awaited that trial; the recordings supported witness-intimidation charges, and there were no murder charges in that case. Savage testified and said his recorded remarks reflected anger and that he never meant to act on them.
His former right-hand man testified against him at that trial and was expected to testify again in any later proceeding.
On Saturday, October 9, 2004, six people died in North Philadelphia. Police ruled the deaths homicides that night. The dead were two women and four children. In the first days afterward, no suspects were named.
The six were Marcella Coleman, 54; Tameka Nash, 34; Sean Rodriguez, 15; Tahj Porchea, 12; Khadjah Nash, 10; and Damir Jenkins, 15 months. All six were members of the family of the former associate who had agreed to cooperate with the FBI and who was to testify again against Savage.
Prosecutors later told the jury that Savage ordered the killings in a telephone call from federal custody to a co-defendant, and the indictment charged Lewis and Robert Merritt with carrying them out. Lewis pleaded guilty. The federal charges for these six deaths were six counts of murder in aid of racketeering, with a count of retaliating against a witness by murder, a conspiracy count and a further offense charged for the same events.
The case against Savage took about a decade to assemble. The FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, the Philadelphia Police Department and the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, with the Maple Shade, New Jersey, Police Department, worked on it, supported by the Bureau of Prisons and the Marshals Service. The inquiry rested on recorded conversations made while Savage was in custody and on the testimony of former members of the organization, chiefly Lewis, who agreed to cooperate.
In April 2009 a federal grand jury in Philadelphia returned a 26-count indictment naming Savage, Lewis, Robert Merritt and Steven Northington. It charged a racketeering conspiracy running from late 1997 to August 2007, and twelve murders, eleven of which were attributed to Savage. The U.S. Attorney's Office announced it on April 8, 2009. The acting U.S. Attorney, Laurie Magid, described the group as perhaps the most violent drug gang the city had seen.
Savage was arraigned before Judge Surrick on June 5, 2009. He pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Christopher Warren, called the case a product of "corrupt, polluted, self-serving sources" and argued that much of the evidence overlapped with the 2005 prosecution, which raised double-jeopardy issues. A second superseding indictment unsealed on June 22, 2011 added a further co-defendant and a twelfth murder count against Savage, for the death of Carlton Brown. In March 2011 prosecutors filed notice that they would seek the death penalty against him. The fourth superseding indictment followed in May 2012.
Jury selection began on November 5, 2012, and took about thirty days spread across the winter. Savage changed lawyers during jury selection, and his court-appointed counsel at trial were Christian Hoey and William Purpura; the change of counsel was later one of the grounds raised on appeal. Opening statements and testimony began on February 4, 2013.
The prosecution team was Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Troyer and John Gallagher and Steven Mellin, a trial attorney in the Justice Department's Capital Case Section. They relied on Lewis, who admitted eleven murders, and on dozens of recorded jailhouse calls and conversations. The defense lawyers argued that Savage was a street dealer rather than a leader of an organization, that other people had at least as much reason to retaliate against the witness, and that the jury should discount the recordings and the testimony of men who had admitted crimes themselves. Neither Savage nor his co-defendants testified.
On May 13, 2013, the jury of nine women and three men returned its verdict after deliberating for a week. It convicted Savage of 12 counts of murder in aid of racketeering, one count of conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering, one count of retaliating against a witness by murder, a count of conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise, and a further offense connected with the 2004 killings. The twelve murder convictions were the most for any defendant in modern Philadelphia history and one short of the state record at the time.
Northington was convicted of the murders of Barry Parker and Tybius Flowers and of racketeering conspiracy. Merritt was convicted of racketeering conspiracy, and a further co-defendant was convicted of counts tied to the Coleman killings.
The penalty phase began on May 21, 2013, and lasted about a week. Prosecutors told the jury that Savage had ordered seven of the killings while in federal custody and argued that he remained a danger. Among the aggravating factors they cited were that the victims of one set of offenses were children and that there were multiple victims. Defense lawyers listed 25 mitigating factors, among them his father's early death, the neighborhood in which he grew up, and the fact that he had not harmed another inmate or a guard or attempted to escape. They asked jurors to compare his fate with that of Lewis, who had admitted the killings and was cooperating.
On May 31, after about ten hours of deliberation over two days, the jury voted unanimously for death on each of the 13 eligible counts: the twelve counts of murder in aid of racketeering and the count of retaliating against a witness by murder. On June 3, 2013, in a hearing that lasted about ten minutes, Judge Surrick imposed thirteen death sentences. He also imposed life imprisonment for the racketeering conspiracy and two ten-year terms, for the murder conspiracy and the remaining offense. Savage declined the judge's offer to speak.
The same jury considered Northington. It voted for life imprisonment on June 13, 2013.
Lamont Lewis pleaded guilty in 2011 to the murders of the six members of the witness's family and, under his plea agreement, to five other murders, eleven in all. He testified for the government and was sentenced by Judge Surrick on November 5, 2014 to 40 years in federal custody, to be followed by ten years of supervised release.
Steven Northington, 41 at the time of the verdict, was sentenced to life imprisonment on the two murder counts and racketeering conspiracy. Robert Merritt, 34 at his sentencing on September 19, 2014, received a life sentence with five years of supervised release. A further co-defendant, tried alongside them, was also sentenced to life.
The defense filed post-trial motions under Rules 29, 33 and 34 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and Judge Surrick denied them in September 2014. His appeal reached the Third Circuit on October 1, 2014. The appeal was argued on January 7, 2020, before Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith and Judges Kent Jordan and Julio Fuentes.
The court issued a 201-page opinion in August 2020 affirming the convictions and the death sentences. It held that Savage had shown no grounds for relief on the issues he raised, among them gaps in the trial record, the substitution of counsel during jury selection and the refusal of a continuance, the county from which the jury was drawn, the fair cross-section of the jury pool, the prosecution's strike of one juror, instructions on transferred intent and on lay opinion, and several penalty-phase rulings. His lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg, called the decision flawed and said it endorsed significant infringements on the rights of defendants facing capital punishment. The appeals court denied rehearing on October 30, 2020.
Savage petitioned the Supreme Court on March 29, 2021. The government filed its opposition on October 7, 2021, and the Supreme Court denied the petition on November 15, 2021. At the time of the Third Circuit decision, Savage was the only Pennsylvanian on federal death row.
On December 23, 2024, President Biden announced that he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, among them Savage, to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The White House said the president believed the federal government should not use the death penalty except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder. A relative of the victims said she was disappointed. An attorney who does not represent Savage said the decision was final and that Savage could no longer be executed. The convictions were not affected by the commutation.
The counts on which Savage was convicted come from several federal statutes. The racketeering conspiracy count (18 U.S.C. section 1962(d)) carries a maximum of life in prison. The murder counts were brought under section 1959(a)(1), the conspiracy count under section 1959(a)(5), and the witness-retaliation count under section 1513. Prosecutors told the court that each defendant faced death or mandatory life imprisonment on the murder counts, and a separate penalty hearing before the same jury followed the guilty verdict.
Federal capital cases are rare in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and the 2020 review was the first time in nearly a century that the Third Circuit had examined a federal death sentence on direct appeal. Before Savage, no one in the district had been sentenced to death since the penalty was reinstated in 1988, and no federal prisoner from the tri-state area had been executed since at least 1927. Pennsylvania has not carried out an execution since 1999. The federal government resumed executions in 2020 after a pause of nearly two decades, and carried out 13 during President Donald Trump's first term. In 2021 President Biden announced a moratorium on federal executions, and in 2024 he commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men then on federal death row.
Savage denied ordering or taking part in the killings. His lawyers argued at trial that he was a street dealer and not the head of an organization, that others had at least as much reason to retaliate against the witness, and that the jury should discount both his recorded remarks and the testimony of cooperating men who had admitted crimes of their own. Before trial his lawyer argued that the 2009 indictment raised double-jeopardy issues because much of its evidence overlapped with the 2005 case. The courts rejected these arguments: the jury convicted on every count and the Third Circuit found no grounds for relief.
March 19, 1998: Kenneth Lassiter dies in Philadelphia.
September 2000 and September 13, 2001: Mansur Abdullah and Carlton Brown die in Philadelphia.
February 26 and March 14, 2003: Barry Parker and Tyrone Toliver die.
March 1, 2004: Tybius Flowers dies; the state prosecution of Savage over Lassiter's death ends in an acquittal.
April 8, 2004: Savage leaves county custody; within a week he is arrested on federal drug charges.
October 9, 2004: six members of a federal witness's family die in Philadelphia.
2005: Savage is convicted in federal court on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 30 years.
April 2009: A 26-count federal indictment is returned; arraignment June 5, 2009.
March 2011: Prosecutors file notice that they will seek the death penalty.
June 22, 2011: Second superseding indictment unsealed.
May 2012: Fourth superseding indictment.
November 5, 2012: Jury selection begins.
February 4, 2013: Trial begins.
May 13, 2013: Guilty verdict on all counts.
May 31, 2013: Jury votes for death.
June 3, 2013: Thirteen death sentences imposed.
September 2014: Post-trial motions denied; Merritt sentenced to life.
November 5, 2014: Lewis sentenced to 40 years.
August 2020: Third Circuit affirms.
November 15, 2021: Supreme Court denies certiorari.
December 23, 2024: Death sentences commuted to life without the possibility of parole.