Sean Nelson Smith received a 50-year prison sentence Thursday for killing the son of a popular Edgewood community activist.
Harford Circuit Court Judge Stephen M. Waldron imposed the maximum sentence for the August 2007 slaying after hearing tearful testimony from relatives of the 25-year-old victim, Samuel Horne, son of Edgewood community activist Mildred Samy.
“Society has gotten way too violent,” Waldron said, echoing a message Samy often delivered through her bullhorn during neighborhood marches. “Society has to be strong enough to say, ?No, this will not be tolerated.?”
Smith got 30 years for the second-degree murder and 20 years for the gun violation, to be served consecutively, with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
He spoke a few words at the sentencing, to the judge and friends, who had pleaded for a more “rehabilitative” sentence.
Samy glared at Smithas she remembered her dead son.
“I pray every day that I?ll be able to forgive,” she said. “But I?m not ready yet.
?I made the decision to conceive my son in the hope of watching him grow up and raise his own family. I have been robbed of that hope.”
She had kept several of his shirts as mementos; wrapping their arms around herself in pale imitation of his protective hugs, she said.
Smith, a 27-year-old resident of Edgewood and Yonkers, N.Y., was convicted Jan. 16 of second-degree murder and use of a handgun in committing a violent crime.
On Aug. 11, he and several friends had confronted Horne in the 1800 block of Brookside Drive, shot him four times and fled, prosecutors said.
Horne had allegedly threatened to kill Smith early on the morning of the slaying, defense attorneys had testified.
Despite testimony during the January trial that Smith was acting in self-defense, he passed up ample opportunity to walk away from the confrontation, said Deputy State?s Attorney H. Scott Lewis.
