Nearly five years after a roommate walked into an East Village apartment and found a man fatally wounded, a Long Beach resident has been ordered to spend 32 years in state prison for the 2021 killing.
Peter Andrew Hairston, 49, entered a no-contest plea to voluntary manslaughter earlier this month and was sentenced this week in a Long Beach courtroom. The case dates back to February 2021, when first responders were called to a downtown apartment where a man had been shot and later died.
Hairston pleaded no contest on Jan. 15 and received a 32-year state prison term, according to the Press-Telegram. Prosecutors told the court they believed Hairston’s actions during the incident amounted to “a psychotic episode,” the newspaper reported.
The Long Beach Police Department said officers were dispatched on Feb. 16, 2021, to the 600 block of Olive Avenue after a roommate came home and found a man unresponsive. First responders located a male suffering from gunshot wounds inside the residence, according to the department’s account. Detectives treated the case as a homicide and ultimately identified suspects for presentation to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The Long Beach Police Department detailed the early stages of that investigation.
Local coverage at the time noted that detectives arrested 22-year-old Alexus Belgrove on Feb. 17, then took Hairston into custody on Feb. 18 after officers were called to check on a person who was banging on doors in the 1000 block of Gaviota Avenue. The Long Beach Post reported that Belgrove was booked on suspicion of accessory to murder and that Hairston was held on $2 million bail.
Sentencing and Plea
Prosecutors said Hairston’s no-contest plea resolved the case without the need for a jury trial, and the judge imposed the 32-year sentence at the Jan. 15 hearing, the Press-Telegram reported. The lengthy term brings formal closure in court to a homicide that pulled Long Beach detectives into an intensive East Village investigation in 2021.
Legal Note
A plea of nolo contendere, commonly known as “no contest,” lets a defendant accept punishment without formally admitting guilt in a criminal case. For sentencing, courts treat it the same way they treat a guilty plea, as explained in the Superior Court glossary. Under California law, voluntary manslaughter is defined as an unlawful killing that occurs “upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion” and typically carries shorter potential prison terms than the sentence in this case, according to Penal Code section 192 summaries. FindLaw provides an overview of that statute.
The sentence brings a measure of finality to a case that began in February 2021, when investigators first responded to the East Village apartment where Neals was found. Long Beach detectives and prosecutors assembled the evidence that ultimately led to Hairston’s plea and the decades-long prison term imposed this month.
