A Mansfield man already serving nearly a decade in prison will spend the rest of his life there after being convicted in connection with the 2022 execution-style shooting of a teenager whose body was found between trash cans in a Columbus Hilltop alley.
Jaheym Cheeks, 23, appeared Oct. 3 before Franklin County Common Pleas Court Judge Kim Brown, who sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. A jury has found Cheeks guilty on Sept. 17 of aggravated murder and murder in the March 5, 2022, shooting of 14-year-old Brylan Butcher, also of Mansfield.
Cheeks is also serving a prison sentence of more than nine years for unrelated charges from Richland County.
Assistant Franklin County Prosecutors Steve Schott and Cedric Ware had asked for the life sentence, the maximum possible, given the way in which Cheeks killed Butcher and Cheeks’ previous criminal history.
Court records say that video footage from the 300 block of South Terrace Avenue in the Hilltop shows Cheeks getting out of the passenger side of a vehicle. The video, captured shortly after midnight, shows Cheeks shooting Butcher before getting into the driver’s seat of the vehicle, court records say.
Prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo that Cheeks later told a witness he would “sleep fine” after killing Butcher.
About two weeks before his body was found, Butcher had been reported as a runaway from the Abraxas treatment facility in Mansfield.
“Deceiving a 14-year-old boy to enter a vehicle and driving him in the middle of the night out of town to execute him, before actually putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger, is, by itself, sufficient to warrant a term of life in prison without the possibility of parole,” prosecutors said.
Cheeks had been involved in several other crimes, including armed robbery, in the days before Butcher was killed, and he believed Butcher knew “too much,” court records say.
Following the shooting, Cheeks and the other person in the vehicle, 22-year-old Justice Vereen, drove out of state and threw away the gun used in the shooting. Police were later able to find the gun in Tennessee.
Vereen pleaded guilty in 2024 to involuntary manslaughter. On Oct. 3, Brown sentenced Vereen to 11 to 16½ years in prison.
Reporter Bethany Bruner can be reached at bbruner@gannett.com or on Bluesky at @bethanybruner.dispatch.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Mansfield man gets life in prison for ‘execution’ of 14-year-old in Hilltop
Reporting by Bethany Bruner, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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