Penn Hills man gets mandatory life in prison for home invasion beating death

A Penn Hills man will spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of being released after being sentenced Tuesday in the beating death of a man during a home invasion.

A jury found Charles Pershing, 40, guilty of second-degree murder for killing Loxley Johns, 65, at Johns’ home on Runnete Street on Sept. 3, 2018.

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Kelly Bigley imposed the mandatory sentence.

Investigators said Johns was returning to the house in the early-morning hours when Pershing attacked him outside. There was evidence of a struggle on the porch, including a chair that had been shattered and blood.

Pershing got Johns inside the house and hogtied him, leaving him downstairs before moving upstairs and attacking Johns’ fiancee, Monica McWilson.

She testified at trial that she heard someone in her adult daughter’s bedroom around 4 a.m., and when she went to check on the noise, she was attacked.

McWilson said she recognized her attacker as having been from the neighborhood.

McWilson said Pershing overpowered her, bound her hands and blindfolded her, leaving her that way for about three hours.

Johns died from head injuries two weeks later.

In a victim impact statement to the court, McWilson said she and Johns had been together for eight years and did everything together.

McWilson told Bigley that Johns was an elder in the Jamaican community, a loyal friend and doting father.

He worked as a server.

“He taught me how to enjoy the little things in life and that true happiness has prerequisites,” she wrote in her letter. “We were opposites on paper but deeply in love.”

McWilson said that the attack left her without a home, without her fiance and without a sense of security.

“A bright, loving light has been permanently dimmed,” she said. “I often question why God would allow this [to] occur. My steadfast belief as a Christian knows that the rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

Defense attorney Christopher Marsili said his client is disappointed by the verdict and will pursue a possible appeal.

Pershing also addressed the court on his own behalf, telling Bigley that from age 10 on, he raised himself.

Still, he said he had a good life. As an adult, he had a good job and was the first in his family to get a house.

But then about 15 years ago, he got into a serious car accident and became addicted to painkillers.

“I didn’t know that I was doing wrong for a long time with the painkillers, and then I did know, and I didn’t stop, and I couldn’t stop, and I lost everything,” Pershing said. “I lost my house. I went to jail. And nobody was there, because I abandoned everyone.”

He tried to get clean, he said, and then got addicted to heroin.

“I’m sorry I destroyed a family, but I destroyed mine, too.”