A Bexar County judge sentenced Jer Auntey Pleasant to four concurrent 50-year prison terms after prosecutors said he used Grindr to lure two San Antonio men to separate meetings and killed them on back-to-back days in April 2023.
The sentence, imposed Friday by Judge Kristina Escalona of the 186th District Court, covers the murders of Larry Wilson, 54, and Joseph West, 22, along with convictions for aggravated robbery and aggravated sexual assault of a child. Because the terms run at the same time, the punishment is often described as 200 years in total but works in practice as four overlapping 50-year sentences. The ruling matters now because it closes the trial court phase of one of San Antonio’s more disturbing recent homicide cases, one built from dating app messages, fingerprint evidence and ballistics that detectives said tied two scenes together almost immediately.
The killings unfolded over less than two days in mid-April 2023. Police said Wilson was shot just before midnight on April 14 at the Banyan Tree Apartments on Cross Creek near Loop 410. Officers found him dead in the driver’s seat of a white Ford Expedition. Witnesses told investigators they saw a man in a red hoodie at the passenger side of the SUV firing several shots before grabbing a black duffel bag and running off. Detectives later searched Wilson’s phone and found explicit messages on Grindr with a man using the name Derek who had arranged to meet him at the complex and said he would be wearing a red jacket. Wilson’s last known communication came minutes before officers got the first call about the shooting, according to the arrest record that later formed the backbone of the case.
The second homicide came into view the next day and gave detectives the break they needed. Police were called to apartments on Von Scheele Drive in the Medical Center area for a welfare check after a friend reported not hearing from West. A witness looking through the window saw what the affidavit described as “a foot hanging off the bed.” Officers entered and found West face down with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head. A spent 9 mm casing lay on the bed. Investigators learned that West also used Grindr and had communicated with the same suspect before his death. From there, the evidence began to line up in a way prosecutors later described as decisive. Ballistics testing showed the shell casing from West’s apartment matched the casings collected in Wilson’s killing. Fingerprints that police attributed to Pleasant were recovered from an open condom wrapper under West’s bed, and records from the earlier scene also placed his prints inside Wilson’s vehicle.
That evidentiary link was central because police never publicly described a personal dispute or a clear motive. Instead, the case was built through what detectives could show happened before and after the meetings. Investigators said Pleasant used the alias Derek on the app, arranged encounters with both men and then appeared at the agreed locations. In Wilson’s case, witnesses placed the gunman at the SUV door and said he took property before fleeing. In West’s case, the evidence suggested a more contained shooting inside the apartment. Prosecutors later said phone records, fingerprints and the matched firearm evidence allowed local authorities to connect the cases quickly and move the investigation from suspicion to arrest. Pleasant was 22 when police arrested him in April 2023. He is now 25. His age at sentencing became one more reminder of how long the case had moved through pretrial litigation, preparation and trial before Friday’s ruling.
The murders were not the only crimes folded into the sentence. Prosecutors said Pleasant’s pattern began at least a year earlier. In March 2022, they said, he met another victim through the same dating app and shot that person during an attempted robbery. That case resulted in the aggravated robbery conviction included in Friday’s punishment. Prosecutors also said Pleasant committed the aggravated sexual assault of a 13-year-old child in July 2022 and that DNA evidence identified him in that case. Those offenses did not drive the public attention in the same way the two killings did, but they shaped the sentencing picture by giving the court a wider record of violent conduct across separate incidents. Taken together, the convictions painted a prosecution narrative of repeated predatory encounters rather than a single burst of violence confined to one weekend.
The San Antonio case also drew attention because the two homicide scenes were ordinary places. One was an apartment parking lot near a major loop. The other was a bedroom in another apartment complex a day later. The settings made the crimes feel less like a single dramatic spree than a sequence of private meetings that turned lethal behind closed doors and parked car doors. Detectives did not need a confession to connect them. They used the digital trail left on phones, physical evidence recovered from each scene and witness descriptions that matched details in the messages. That combination gave prosecutors a straightforward courtroom story to tell. Under the name Derek, they argued, Pleasant arranged the meetings. At each location, he arrived as planned. At each location, investigators recovered evidence they said pointed back to him. By the time the case reached sentencing, the state was no longer arguing only inference. It had jury convictions and a judge ready to impose decades in prison.
After Friday’s sentencing, Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said the result could not restore the lives that were lost but did mark “a step toward justice for the victims and their loved ones.” That statement captured the limited but important finality of the hearing. For Wilson’s and West’s families, the sentence answered the immediate question of punishment even if it could not answer every human one left by the killings. For the court, the hearing closed a prosecution that had started with two separate crime scenes and ended as one linked case. For Pleasant, the four concurrent terms mean he now moves from county court proceedings into the state prison system unless later appeals alter the outcome. No public reporting tied the sentencing to any further pending homicide counts in this case, and prosecutors did not describe Friday’s hearing as the start of any new trial phase.
The next legal steps are narrower than the events that brought the case to court. The convictions and sentences now become part of the formal judgment, and Pleasant can pursue the ordinary post-conviction process available in a Texas felony case. Any appeal would focus on the trial record, rulings made before or during trial, and the way the convictions were entered, not on reopening the broad factual outline that prosecutors and jurors already accepted. What stands now is this. Wilson was killed on April 14, 2023. West was killed on April 15, 2023. Prosecutors said the same man set up both meetings, used the same app persona and left behind the evidence that joined the scenes. On March 6, 2026, a judge imposed the sentence that turned that account into the final judgment of the trial court.
As of Monday, the case had shifted from investigation and trial to punishment and any appeal that may follow. The next milestone will come if Pleasant files post-trial motions or a notice of appeal in the weeks after the March 6 sentencing.
Author note: Last updated March 9, 2026.