55 Years in Prison for Devandre Williams, 20, in Killings of Keymarion Hall and Noah Smith, Who Were Both 16

Devandre Bernard Williams was 17 years old when, the night of Jan. 12, 2022, he was driving the car from which Tyrese Patterson and Stephen Monroe were in a gun battle with at Terrell Sampson in South Bunnell. A bullet struck and killed 16-year-old Noah Smith, who was uninvolved and standing in front of his house. Five months later, Williams fired the gun that killed 16-year-old Keymarion Hall, who was also uninvolved in yet another shootout in the same area.

Today, Circuit Judge Terence Perkins sentenced Williams to two concurrent 55-year prison terms for the two shootings. He had faced life in prison for either. He pleaded two weeks ago to a sentence of between 40 to 60 years with a mandatory minimum of 25 years on the count involving Hall, leaving it to Perkins to decide where to set the sentence.




“He was well served,” Ernest Hall, Keymarion’s father, said after the sentence. He wore a t-shirt many in a sizeable audience wore this morning, and that echoed what he had just said: “Justice been served,” one line read above a collage of portraits of Hall, who’d been a student-athlete. “Ball in peace Key.”

“I apologize for my actions,” Williams said, reading in a monotone from a written text just before the sentence, after an hour of testimony from family members. “I’m responsible for my actions. I understand that I’m responsible for the pain that their families deal with and will continue to deal with. I’m also responsible for the pain I caused my family. I also apologize. I can’t change what I did, although I can change what I do, looking forward through the whole journey I have ahead of myself.”

Smith’s family members did not address the court today. Williams’s did. Both young men had similar aspirations. They were both “very good basketball players and had a lot of hopes and dreams in that regard,” Assistant State Attorney Mark Johnson said. “Their deaths have devastated, as you’ve already seen today, devastated two families, and not just families, but friends and teachers, classmates, people in the community that that were their friends and family.”

One of the witnesses who spoke today had been asked by the defense attorney, Kim Hall, about leniency and putting an end to the cycle of “revenge,” as the shootouts had been part of an ongoing feud over nothing much, amplified though the feud was by social media’s accelerants. “I really take issue with that phrase,” Johnson said. “What happens here today really has nothing to do with revenge. The way our system is set up is to prevent that, but it’s to do justice.” He said if the case had gone to trial, evidence would have included videos of Williams and his co-defendants, Tyrese Patterson and Stephen Monroe, displaying guns and playing music in provocative ways, the way that night in January 2022 they had intended to provoke Terrell Sampson, the brother of a man they had a beef with. Words were exchanged, and the gunfight followed.




“That’s when Noah Smith was hit and killed,” Johnson said. “The evidence in the case indicated that it was Tyrese Patterson and Stephen Monroe that fired shots from that vehicle. And then in later interviews with all three of the defendants, it was determined that the defendant in this case–that Andre Williams was the driver of that vehicle.” Why was he charged? Because “it’s very clear that Mr. Williams knew what was going on, was participating in what was going on, and was assisting Steven Monroe and Tyrese Patterson in firing those shots.”

Five months later Williams, Monroe and Monroe’s girlfriend drove around Bunnell while playing a “diss track,” using the music to taunt a crowd before Williams fired a gun 15 times, killing Keymarion Hall and wounding Nysean Giddens. (Giddens was acquitted in July 2023 of first-degree murder in an overdose death. He is serving a five-year prison sentence on drug-charge convictions.) “This was a situation where people were trying to get the best of somebody else, trying to show people that they were the boss, that nobody was going to mess with them. Nobody. And guns became involved.”

Hall argued for some leniency, telling the judge that Williams’s willingness to plead should count in his favor. He called the shootings “opposite of sophisticated”  and not premeditated, and that William’s co-defendants had him “involved in their shenanigans.” Hall said Williams was not asking “for a pass,” but said 40 years in prison would be “fair.”




Perkins said that Williams would be sentenced as an adult, and that there was not a basis for a downward departure in the case, or a lesser sentence. “And quite candidly, even if there was a basis, I would find it to be inappropriate in this case,” the judge said before imposing the two 55-year, concurrent sentences.

Williams has over two years’ credit for time already served at the Flagler County jail. That time will be deducted from his sentence. Williams will be entitled to have his sentence reviewed after 25 years in the case in which he was the shooter, and after 15 years in the case in which he was the driver. Tyrese Patterson was to be sentenced today as well. He faces up to 50 years in prison. That sentencing was pushed to November. Monroe’s case is still in the pre-trial phase.