A greiving mother comes one step nearer to closure following the sentencing of her son’s murderer. - Photo by Andrew Firestone

By Andrew Firestone

It has been two years since Denise Cosby heard the devastating news about her son Justin’s death. Found shot and bleeding on Dunster Street, May 18, 2009, Justin died a few days later, the victim of a marijuana trade gone bad. At the April 22 sentencing, Denise Cosby stood up and delivered a speech of indignation and grief towards her son’s murderer, Jabrai Copney of New York City.

“I hope you think about what you did to Justin each and every day for the rest of your life, as I do,” said Cosby. “May the rest of your life be a continuous hell on earth.”

“He had a disgusted look on his face, as though he wasn’t really wanting to show any expression,” she said to the Somerville News.  “I’m sure he heard me whether he would have listened to what I was saying, I don’t know and I don’t really care.”

Copney was sentenced to natural life imprisonment for his role as the gunman in Justin’s death, which allegedly involved four other people. The story has generated national headlines over the former Harvard student involved in the conspiracy, Brittany Smith, Copney’s girlfriend, who is suspected to have aided in the crime, and lost her chance at graduation.

Cosby, who works at The Norton Group Real Estate office in  Somerville, said that she only grieves for her murdered son and cannot see why such people would risk so much for so little. “[Smith] wasted her whole life. She wasted her whole entire time, everything she had worked for towards getting into Harvard. She was there on scholarship, so she blew all of that two weeks before graduation,” she said.

“You would think that if these people were educated, they would have thought this through,” she said. “You would think that, between the five of them, one of them would have at least said, ‘hey, this isn’t a good idea.’”

Cosby said that, while she did not condone her son’s activities in selling marijuana, she did not believe that something so trivial should have cost him his life.

“Justin was my youngest child,” she said. “He was very, very close to me. He was the type of person that no one would think this would ever happen to. He stayed away from bad neighborhoods, questionable neighborhoods,” adding that he would occasionally joke about needing her protection if he were going to pick up tires for his car in Roxbury.

She also insists the boy was not violent, and avoided confrontation. “He was the peacemaker,” among his friends she said, recalling a night when he received a call from his friends regarding a possible fight.

“The next thing I knew, he flew out the house, and he comes back with friends behind him. He’s telling them ‘you’re crazy man. Don’t call me about anymore about no fights. I want to hang out with the girls, not be messing around with you guys.’”

Justin, she said, was a young man who enjoyed nothing more than tinkering around with his ’95 BMW, and was a scholarship student who had recently withdrew from UMASS Salem, but planned to return and complete a major in computer science. She says that the murder, over a supposed $5,000 dollars worth of marijuana has “been like a bomb that came through my family.”

Cosby said that her Cambridge neighborhood has been very supportive, but that she and her loved ones continue to struggle in coming to grips with the senseless crime. She said some of the younger members of her family are in therapy now, trying to understand how their beloved young uncle was “killed by the bad guys.”

However, Cosby can take solace that the killer is now in jail, with no chance of parole. “I felt relieved, I felt thankful,” she said of her feelings at the hearing. “It was a little nerve-racking just waiting for them to say ‘guilty.’”