OAKLAND — An alleged member of a San Francisco gang has been sentenced to 21 years in prison for killing two people, one of whom was later named as a suspect in the tragic killing of a 1-year-old boy during a rolling gun battle.
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The case and several related investigations are the latest example of San Francisco gang conflicts spilling into the East Bay, with deadly results.
Darious Pierre Smith, 36, of Pleasant Hill, is an alleged member of San Francisco’s Chopper City gang and a longtime suspect in the fatal shooting of 30-year-old Richard Lamont Duncan III and the drive-by killing of 34-year-old Keison “Keke” Lee. Both homicides occurred in Oakland, with Duncan being fatally shot by a masked gunman in June 2022 and Lee being gunned down in East Oakland five months later, in November.
In July, Smith reached a deal with Alameda County prosecutors in both cases. He pleaded no contest to two counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 21-year prison sentence. This includes 21 years for killing Duncan and a concurrent six-year prison term for killing Lee, court records show. On July 8, Smith was transferred to North Kern State Prison, where he remains.
Police attributed Lee’s killing to gang violence between Chopper City and the San Francisco gang known as Eddy Rock, of which Lee was allegedly a member. On Nov. 6, 2021, he and 34-year-old Johnny Jackson were driving on Interstate 880 in Oakland when two alleged Chopper City gang members — identified by police as 22-year-old Trevor Green, of Richmond and 24-year-old Ivory Bivins, of Vallejo — pulled up alongside them. In the gunfight that followed, a stray bullet traveled across the freeway and fatally struck Jasper Wu, a 1-year-old Fremont boy who was riding in the backseat of his parents’ car.
Jackson was initially charged with murder, but a judge threw out the case at the preliminary hearing, after his lawyer argued he and Lee had been ambushed without provocation. Green and Bivins are still being prosecuted for allegedly killing Wu.
Lee was shot and killed almost exactly a year later, around 2 p.m. on Nov. 4, 2022, on the 800 block of 81st Avenue in East Oakland.
Police say the motive for Duncan’s killing began at a party on Treasure Island hours earlier, where Duncan and other partygoers ended up in a conflict. The original confrontation involved Duncan’s female relatives who were allegedly attacked by an assailant. When Duncan intervened, someone else at the party threatened to call someone “to clear this (expletive) out,” police said at the time.
After the party, Duncan ended up at an after-hours event on the 1700 block of Broadway Avenue in downtown Oakland. At around 3:45 a.m. on June 23, 2022, a masked gunman walked up and fired at Duncan, killing him, police say. Prosecutors allege that Smith’s DNA was found on a shell casing at the scene and they have evidence showing he was called to the area by at least one person who’d been involved in the earlier conflict.
According to police, the major break in the case stemmed from another investigation which remains unsolved to this day.
Smith was also a person of interest in a third homicide that year, the Sept. 8, 2022 killing of Dominique Miles. Police said at the time that Miles and a second man, Paris Moffett, were leaving a funeral on the 300 block of 27th Street in Oakland when someone pulled up and shot them both. Moffett survived, but was paralyzed. In 2023, two still-unidentified gunmen entered a medical facility near Lake Merritt, searched the premises and killed Moffett there. Both men were also part of the Eddy Rock gang, according to police.
Police identified Smith as a possible person of interest in Miles’ killing, but he was never charged. He was still under investigation in mid-November 2022, though, when an Oakland detective noticed that while no cellphone data was available to place Smith at Miles’ homicide scene, phones belonging to him and his girlfriend were placed near the scene of Lee’s killing. Further investigation tied Smith to Lee’s homicide, and eventually, to Duncan’s, court records show.