A man once charged with murder in the 2012 shooting death of 25-year-old Johnny Peay has been sentenced to prison, though not for homicide. Connell Muskelly pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and one count of burning personal property, and was sentenced to 11 to 23 months behind bars.
A Botched Robbery Turns Deadly
According to WSOC-TV, the case traces back to September 2012, when Muskelly and another man allegedly planned to rob Peay during a drug transaction in west Charlotte. The plan went wrong, and Peay was fatally shot in the back during the attempted robbery, per the station's report. The outlet attributes those details to a statement released by the Mecklenburg County District Attorney's homicide team in 2016.
At the time of the shooting, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police moved quickly to identify a suspect. A 2012 report from WBTV said police charged Connell Montigo Muskelly, then 26, with murder in connection with Peay's death, a detail also reported that year by myfox8.com, which described him as a 26-year-old from Augusta, Georgia. Neither the original charge nor this week's sentencing document establishes that Muskelly was ultimately convicted of murder; the available record shows only the guilty pleas to the firearm and arson-related counts described by the same account.
A Related Case Ended in a Hung Jury
Peay's killing also led to charges against another man, Deonte Lanier, whose case took a dramatic turn in court years later. As The Charlotte Observer reported, Lanier's three-week trial in 2016 ended with a hung jury on every charge except one: possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Lanier subsequently reached a plea agreement with Mecklenburg prosecutors, agreeing to serve between 67 and 93 months for attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon, the paper reported.
The available reporting does not spell out how the Lanier proceedings connect legally to the charges Muskelly ultimately pleaded guilty to, nor does it detail the full roles each man is alleged to have played in Peay's death. What is clear is that more than a decade after Peay was killed during what was meant to be a robbery, the case has produced prison sentences for two men on charges short of murder, closing out at least one chapter of a long-running west Charlotte homicide investigation.
