Colorado Politics

Murder of teenage brothers during ‘ghost gun’ sale leads to conviction, guilty plea for two men

Two men have been sentenced for the deaths of two teenage brothers during a robbery nearly three years ago.

A Jefferson County jury convicted Marqueil Banks, 18, of shooting 17-year-old Dillon Wikoff and 18-year-old Damian Wikoff during an August 2020 incident in which the brothers planned to sell a homemade “ghost gun” and trade for another firearm, but the group of defendants planned to rob them instead.

Banks’ co-defendant, 20-year-old Michael Mendoza, recruited a group of teenagers for the robbery, according to a news release from the district attorney’s office.

The jury convicted Banks on March 31 of two counts of premeditated first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated robbery. A juvenile at the time of the killings, Banks received a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years for the murder charges. He received a 32-year sentence for the robbery counts to be served concurrently with the life sentence.

Mendoza pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery and manslaughter and received a sentence in late April of 20.5 years.

A third teenager, 15 at the time of the shootings, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery and received a sentence of two years of juvenile intensive supervised probation. A fourth teenager, also 15 at the time, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and got a four-year sentence in the Division of Youth Services, according to the news release.

Police handcuffs on the table (copy)
(Photo illustration by cokinaci, Fotolia)
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