Families Slam Plea Deals After Five Sentenced in Dadeville Sweet 16 Shooting

What justice would look like, it would be at least 30 years." That was Amy Jackson's assessment after five men were sentenced to five years in prison each for a mass shooting that killed four young people at a Sweet 16 birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, in 2023. Jackson is the cousin of Shaunkivia Nicole "KeKe" Smith, 17, one of the dead.

The five men, who pleaded guilty to reckless murder, also received 15 years of probation. The plea deals stunned and angered family members gathered in the courtroom, many of whom said the punishment bore no relationship to the scale of what happened that night: four people killed, more than 30 wounded, in a burst of gunfire that rocked a small city of 3,200 and drew national attention.

The dead were Philstavious "Phil" Dowdell, 18; Shaunkivia Nicole "KeKe" Smith, 17; Marsiah Emmanuel "Siah" Collins, 19; and Corbin Holston, 23. Dowdell and Smith were high school seniors.

The five men sentenced Friday were Willie Brown, 22; Wilson Hill, 23; Travis McCollough, 19; Tyreese McCollough, 20; and Sherman Peters, 18. A sixth defendant received youthful-offender status, and that person's court records are not public. Only Tyreese McCollough addressed the court, telling the judge and the victims' families he was "very sorry."

The five pleaded guilty to the deaths of Dowdell, Smith and Collins. The charge involving Holston's death was dropped. District Attorney Mike Segrest defended the agreements, telling the court the plea deals represented the best available outcome given the evidence. Segrest said prosecutors could establish that the defendants exchanged gunfire with Holston but could not determine who shot first, making charges tied to his death legally difficult to sustain against the five.

The broader evidentiary challenge was the chaos of the scene itself. Multiple parties exchanged gunfire that night, and prosecutors said they could not definitively establish who fired the fatal rounds in every instance, limiting what they could prove at trial.

Dadeville sits about 60 miles northeast of Montgomery. In the days after the April 2023 shooting, community members left candles bearing the victims' names outside the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio, a quiet memorial in a city that had never seen anything like it. The case has since revived questions about prosecutorial discretion in multi-shooter mass-casualty events and whether existing legal frameworks give prosecutors sufficient tools when gunfire comes from multiple directions. For the families who sat through Friday's hearing, those questions had a simple answer: five years was not enough.