A St. Louis man who once worked to fight violence in south city has admitted to his role in a 2022 murder-for-hire plot.
Jerome Williams, 52, pleaded guilty in federal court on Tuesday to a single count of evidence tampering. He will be sentenced in April.
According to the plea deal, Williams and a number of other men, including Titus Armstead, were involved in a drug trafficking operation that had a stash house in New Jersey. Someone robbed the stash house of millions of dollars in spring 2022, and Armstead was suspected of being involved.
Williams helped lure Armstead to St. Louis, where he was shot and killed in Penrose Park early in the morning of April 22, 2022. Williams provided proof that Armstead had been killed by displaying his Social Security card and a photo of his body on a cellphone. Williams then tore up the card and threw the cellphone out the window of his car.
At the time Williams was working as a violence interrupter in Dutchtown, one of the city’s three sites for Cure Violence. The program trains people who live in violent neighborhoods to intervene in conflicts to prevent further violence. Many of them have criminal convictions in their past, including Williams. According to the federal government, he was on supervised release after serving a long sentence for kidnapping when he helped in Armstead’s death. He was also convicted of drug trafficking charges in 1990.
While the city has seen a drop in violent crime since 2020, research published in November found that Cure Violence had little impact on gun violence in Dutchtown. The results were similar to findings from Richard Rosenfeld, a former criminologist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
