the murder charge against him<\/a>.<\/p>\nDempsey, an Oakland resident, had been charged with killing 25-year-old Devonya Thurston inside the Go Go Amigo Market on 105th Avenue on the afternoon of July 1, 2024. Surveillance footage from inside the store showed tension between Dempsey and Thurston, which Dempsey attempted to defuse by shaking Thurston\u2019s hand. Thurston rejected the offer, telling him, \u201cit\u2019s not cool,\u201d according to witness testimony.<\/p>\n
The footage shows Thurston leaving and coming back \u2014 Dempsey\u2019s lawyer argued he grabbed a weapon while off camera. When Thurston blocked Dempsey\u2019s exit from the store, Dempsey allegedly pulled an assault rifle from his pants and shot him six times.<\/p>\n
Judge Clifford Blakely, who reviewed the evidence at a preliminary hearing last year, said he was upholding the murder charge by a \u201crazor thin\u201d margin and that he didn\u2019t want to speculate whether a jury would acquit Dempsey. He said it \u201cdoesn\u2019t take a genius\u201d to surmise why Thurston walked away and returned, but added that Dempsey couldn\u2019t have known for sure \u201cwhat Thurston got.\u201d<\/p>\n
After that hearing, Dempsey remained in jail for months while his lawyer and prosecutors negotiated a resolution. He pleaded no contest to the gun charge last December and was formally sentenced at a Jan. 20 hearing, court records show. At the time of his sentencing, he had less than two months left to serve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND \u2014 The murder charge barely made it past its first legal test, with a judge expressing \u201creal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[861,862,143,114965,145,864,144,865],"class_list":{"0":"post-261518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-bay-area-crime","9":"tag-california-crime","10":"tag-oakland","11":"tag-oakland-convenience-store","12":"tag-oakland-headlines","13":"tag-oakland-murder","14":"tag-oakland-news","15":"tag-oakland-shooting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}