‘A deadly risk to all.’ Tacoma man killed, then killed again. Now he’ll serve decades
The first time Marcus Langford was sentenced for his role in a Tacoma murder, more than a decade ago, he told the judge he was just a kid who couldn’t control his accomplice’s actions, and he asked for a second chance.
Sitting before a different Pierce County Superior Court judge Friday, now 28 years old and responsible for two more dead bodies, Langford had nothing to say. Whatever punishment Judge Bryan Chushcoff imposed, Langford was looking at a minimum of a half-century in prison. Chushcoff gave him nearly 62 years.
Langford was convicted this year in two homicides that occurred five months apart in 2022. He pleaded guilty in September to second-degree manslaughter for the death of Annabelle Hichens, 33, who was found dead April 11, 2022 with a gunshot wound to the head in a vehicle on Day Island.
Deputy prosecuting attorney and judge-elect Scott Peters said in court that the killing was retaliation against someone Langford thought was going to rip him off.
Then on Nov. 19, 2022, Langford was a passenger in a car that passed a gas station across the street from Wright Park. In Chushcoff’s recounting of the incident, Langford recognized 33-year-old Marquis McGown in a Dodge Charger at the station. They circled the block and dropped off Langford, who approached the other car with a 9mm pistol and unloaded 10 shots in seconds, mortally wounding McGown and badly injuring the driver, 32-year-old Zenas Martinez.
Langford was convicted in a jury trial Aug. 29 of premeditated first-degree murder, first-degree assault and first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm, along with other offenses.
“At some point you are what you do,” Peters said Friday. “And what the defendant in this case does is kill people.”
Prosecutors described Langford as a cold-blooded killer who hadn’t learned from his first go-around. Peters said the defendant’s behavior had escalated from his 2012 case, where Langford and James Stimson, both 16, tried to rob 45-year-old David Watson in a convenience store parking lot. Stimson shot and killed the man.
A jury found Langford guilty of first-degree murder for his part in it, a conviction that was later reversed on appeal and pled down to first-degree manslaughter, reducing his 28-year sentence by two decades.
One of Langford’s attorneys from the Department of Assigned Counsel, Kelsey Page, had a different view of her client’s path to Chushcoff’s courtroom, describing how the system had routinely failed young Black and brown men.
After Langford was sentenced for the 2012 homicide, Page said he went to Green Hill for a year, a state-run juvenile detention facility, before transferring to prison at age 19. The attorney said Langford was surrounded by men who set their eyes on Langford and “brutally” assaulted him over and over again.
“Everyone knew it because of how horrific it was,” Page said. “And [Department of Corrections] utterly failed to protect a child that was in their care, and it left such deep wounds, your honor, that he could not recover from.”
Langford was transferred to a different facility and eventually released at the end of a 90-month sentence without proper support or counseling. The defense attorney said he turned to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain.
“We have to do better,” Page said.
Chushcoff said Page had raised an “interesting argument” about what to do with people like Langford, who had difficult upbringings, experienced brutality in the prison system and then turned to alcohol and drugs to self-medicate.
The judge said the suggestion was that on some level, Langford was not a “responsible moral force.” But what to do about it? Chushcoff said families of victims would say we can have compassion, but if the result is Langford is a danger to the rest of us, what do we do about that?
“And isn’t criminal law organized around the idea that it’s done to protect all the rest of us?” Chushcoff said.
Chushcoff said he had represented people accused and guilty of murder before, and it’s never been his experience that an individual could be beyond all possible redemption.
But then the judge began to recount the details of the 2022 gas station shooting, concluding it was a “calculated murder.”
“Why Mr. Langford got to this point — because of things that happened to him in his childhood or in society or in prison from the manslaughter charge — I don’t know, and maybe none of us will,” Chushcoff said.
“But I do agree that Mr. Langford poses such a deadly risk to all of us that he justifies a serious sentence,” he added.
This story was originally published November 23, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
