One of two brothers who admitted taking part in the fatal street robbery of a 24-year-old transgender woman in the District was given a seven-year prison term Friday by a judge who credited him for cooperating with prosecutors in the case but declared: “You can’t get a pass. … Some events are just too bad, they’re too heinous.”

       Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight

       Cyheme Hall, now 26, and his older brother, Shareem Hall, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 2016 shooting of Deeniquia “Dee Dee” Dodds. They then testified in D.C. Superior Court against their two accomplices in the botched robbery. After a mistrial caused by a deadlocked jury, the two other men agreed to plea bargains and were given eight-year prison terms.

       Shareem Hall is scheduled to be sentenced next month. On Friday, Cyheme Hall appeared before Superior Court Judge Milton C. Lee Jr. and said he was sorry for participating in a string of early-morning street stickups when Dodds was killed.

       Advertisement

       “I’d like to apologize to the decedent, and the family the decedent had, for the pain and suffering they endured,” said Hall, who has been jailed since his arrest in September 2016. With credit for time served, he has only about 18 months left on his seven-year sentence. But Lee also imposed a consecutive two-year term in a 2013 home invasion case, in which Hall initially received a suspended sentence.

       “I’m willing to give you some break, because I think you were of assistance to the government,” Lee said. But he said that “the shooting death of Ms. Dodds was one of the most senseless acts I’ve unfortunately been exposed to.”

       Police said the Hall brothers and accomplices Jolonta Little and Monte Johnson, three of them carrying guns, were prowling parts of Northeast and Northwest D.C. in a Pontiac in the predawn hours of July 4, 2016, looking for people to rob. They accosted seven victims, according to police. When Dodds was attacked, police said, she fought back, grabbing the barrel of one of the pistols, and was fatally shot.

       Advertisement

       After the U.S. attorney’s office in the District initially said it would seek hate-crime sentencing enhancements, alleging that the men had deliberately targeted transgender women, the hate-crime allegations were dropped for lack of evidence. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t true, Lee said from the bench.

       “The four of you made the conscious decision to ride around the city and rob people,” he told Hall. “And the individuals that you picked on were, I think, some of the most vulnerable individuals in the District of Columbia.”

       At the 2019 trial of Little and Johnson, who were charged with first-degree murder, the Hall brothers implicated themselves and the two defendants in the robberies, and Cyheme Hall testified that Johnson shot Dodds. He said one of the men grabbed her silver clutch purse after she collapsed, then they hurried back to the car and fled.

       Advertisement

       “There was nothing in the purse,” he told the jury.

       After the trial ended with a deadlocked jury, Little and Johnson both pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in deals with prosecutors.

       In the 2013 home invasion for which Cyheme Hall was sentenced Friday to two years in prison, in addition to his sentence in the Dodds killing, a group of robbers held a man and his wife and mother at gunpoint while they “essentially looted the house,” Lee said. Even though Hall played a relatively minor role in the crime, he “got one incredible break” by initially avoiding incarceration.

       On Friday, he sought another break.

       “I’m just asking you to give me an opportunity to be great, to be a father, to be a role model for my son, who’s 11 years old,” Hall told the judge. “I’m trying to be the best role model I can be for him.”