HomeNewsFrankford man found guilty in ’02 murder case

Frankford man found guilty in ’02 murder case

It was a verdict almost a dozen years in the making, but justice may have to wait some more.

A Common Pleas Court jury on Feb. 25 found a former Frankford man guilty of first-degree murder in the slayings of two neighborhood teens over an alleged drug debt in 2002. Yet three days after the verdict, the same jury spared Fernando Real, 31, a death sentence. Real, who is already serving life in prison for an unrelated 2002 murder, will be formally sentenced to two additional life terms on April 25.

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The latest case stemmed from a Sept. 9, 2002, shooting on the 5200 block of Hawthorne St. where Real cornered Byron Story and Marcus Herbert, both 18, on Herbert’s porch at about 4:30 a.m., pulled a gun and fired numerous bullets at them. Story suffered a head wound and died at the scene. Herbert was hospitalized with multiple back wounds and died 13 months later.

Police detectives suspected a drug link from the start. Story, of the 900 block of Brill St. in Oxford Circle, had been convicted on drug charges before. In a 2003 interview with the Northeast Times, Story’s mother, Juanita Jones, revealed that her son had fallen back into a bad crowd after earning a high school diploma from the Glen Mills Schools. But he also aspired to get a legitimate job and study business management in college, she said.

The slayings remained unsolved until 2007, when authorities re-arrested Real. Last week, the jury deliberated for just three hours before convicting him of two first-degree murder counts, along with robbery, conspiracy and firearms offenses. ••

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