It was Christopher Calloway’s girlfriend who set it up.
The plan was for her to meet up with one of her friends and her friend’s sister last Sept. 25. They would hang out, drive around, and eventually Kalisa Chardale Smith would tell her friends she needed to quickly meet someone in an alley in the St. Paul Payne-Phalen neighborhood.
What she didn’t tell them was that the person was her boyfriend, Calloway, and that he was waiting with a gun along with two other men — Davonte Bobo and Vincent Reanell Harris — to rob them.
Shortly after they pulled up and Smith got out of the car, the robbery ensued. One of the men pistol-whipped Brittany Rock, Smith’s friend. When Rock’s sister, Samantha Burnette, tried to intervene and hit one of the gunmen on the head with a bottle, she was shot dead.
The 16-year-old Minnetonka High School student died in the alley.
Calloway, 33, apologized for his actions in a Ramsey County district courtroom Friday shortly before a judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison for his actions.
The sentencing came a few months after Calloway pleaded guilty of one count of second-degree murder in Burnette’s death and a second count of first-degree aggravated robbery.
His accomplices also ended up pleading guilty, Bobo to the same counts as Calloway and Harris to first-degree aggravated robbery. Both were sentenced this summer.
Smith, 29, pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree-murder and will be sentenced later this month.
Calloway’s attorney, Christopher Zipko, said Burnette’s grandparents and sister described their grief during his sentencing hearing Friday.
“They were pretty shaken up,” Zipko said.
Burnette was a junior at Minnetonka High School when she died and lived with her grandmother in Minnetonka. She was spending the weekend with her mother and sister, who live in St. Paul, when she was shot.
Shortly after she died, her relatives remembered her as a positive, social and loving teen who enjoyed listening to music, skateboarding and hanging out with her sister and two nieces.
Calloway apologized to them Friday, Zipko said.
“He did turn around and look at the family and admitted and owned what he did and obviously he deserved everything he got,” Zipko said.