Gaithersburg teen gets 35 years in prison for role in Wheaton Metro station shooting

Montgomery County police said a man is dead after a shooting at the Wheaton Metro Station. (WTOP/Scott Gelman)

A Gaithersburg, Maryland, teenager was sentenced to 35 years in prison in the Wheaton Metro station shooting last year that left another teenager dead.

On Friday, a judge also recommended Emmanuel Simmonds, 17, who was charged as an adult in the shooting death of 18-year-old Tenneson Leslie Jr., be admitted into the Patuxent Youthful Offenders program.

When Simmonds is released, he will serve five years of supervised probation, prosecutors said.

Simmonds pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in late December in the shooting, which happened on May 18, 2023, after a fight broke out between two groups of people on the escalator. Neither group of people knew each other as the melee began as a verbal one.

Simmonds, who was 16 at the time, shot Leslie Jr. in the head on the train platform.

Prosecutors said that Leslie Jr. and his friends were trying to run away at the time when he was shot from behind. He was taken to a hospital where he later died.

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John Domen

John started working at WTOP in 2016 after having grown up in Maryland listening to the station as a child. While he got his on-air start at small stations in Pennsylvania and Delaware, he's spent most of his career in the D.C. area, having been heard on several local stations before coming to WTOP.

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