The day before the Salem man responsible for killing her son was sentenced, Kimberly McGee went to church and prayed for him and his family.
“I feel this kind of violence, it ripples through everyone’s lives,” McGee, 51, said Monday after a judge sentenced Peter Castillo to life in prison without parole for the 2012 shooting death of her son, Stephen Perez Jr. “There is no joy at the end of the tunnel for any of us.”
At the sentencing in Suffolk Superior Court, family members focused on Perez, an Army veteran who was 22 when Castillo shot him to death.
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“Words will never be enough to capture the true pain we have endured and continue to . . . suffer through,” Rebecca Prouty, 35, said through tears while reading a victim impact statement she and her sister, Amanda Prouty O’Sullivan, had prepared the night before. “The heart of our family was ripped out.”
“The world became a darker place the day Stephen was taken from us, and we will never have that light back again,” she said.
After reading the statement, Prouty cried in the arms of her family.
Castillo did not react during the proceeding.
Perez had been a sniper in the Army and came home to Revere determined to become a federal law enforcement officer, family and friends told the Globe shortly after his death. He was studying at Bunker Hill Community College and planned to transfer to Boston University.
His cousin, Arianna Bordonaro, said Perez had been accepted into the Revere Police Department and was preparing to start at the police academy. “He had defended our country and was on his way to protect us further by being a policeman and keeping this community safe,” she said in court Monday.
After the shooting, Castillo was quickly identified as the gunman through video footage and witness statements, according to authorities. But he fled to New York City the day after the shooting, where he caught a flight to the Dominican Republic. He was arrested there in January 2015.
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Perez was out with friends on April 28, 2012, when he got into a fight in a Tremont Street parking lot after an argument, according to officials and Perez’s family. While Perez was fighting with someone else, Castillo shot him in the back.
The availability of guns turned what could have been a fistfight into a deadly altercation, said Judge Mitchell Kaplan.
“In another age, this incident that occurred results in people going home with perhaps some black eyes, split lips, and hurt feelings, and then they go on to live the rest of their lives,” Kaplan said. “It is in the introduction of a handgun that turned what would have been an unpleasant experience into a tragedy perhaps for everybody involved, and perhaps at some point our society will deal with that.”
Perez’s family and friends welcomed the judge’s words and Castillo’s sentence. “It feels like I’ve been in a lifetime of pain,” said Perez’s girlfriend, Cassandra Barrasso, adding that “justice has been 100 percent served.”
Castillo’s family declined to comment. His attorney, Scott Gleason told the family “that today is not our day to talk.”
Two additional defendants, Luis Sepulveda, 32, and Janice Hardy, 25, both of Lynn, will be tried later for allegedly lying to police and a grand jury investigating the murder, according to the district attorney’s office.
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Jan Ransom can be reached at jan.ransom@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Jan_Ransom.
Andy Rosen can be reached at andrew.rosen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @andyrosen.