A Taco Bell manager who chased an employee off the Scott restaurant’s property and fatally shot him at a nearby business was sentenced Thursday to serve the rest of his life in prison with no chance for parole.
Zairyre Simmons, 26, of Pittsburgh, apologized to the victim’s family and his own during sentencing in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court by Judge Bruce Beemer.
A jury found Simmons guilty of first-degree murder in the Nov. 9, 2022, death of Dorian Carver, 32, of Harrison.
The two men were working together that morning when they began to argue, prosecutors said.
Simmons was a shift manager at the restaurant, and he had recently written up Carver.
The argument became physical and moved into the vestibule, then outside.
Carver left, but Simmons went back inside, grabbed a coat — and, police said, a .40-caliber handgun — and followed Carver.
Simmons shot Carver in the lobby of the Northwestern Mutual Life insurance building 500 feet away.
At trial, Simmons testified that he feared the victim that day, and that he had post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from violence he had experienced earlier in his life.
But that testimony wasn’t enough to sway jurors.
They deliberated about nine hours before finding Simmons guilty on Feb. 4.
At the sentencing hearing on Thursday, Carver’s aunt said that the family’s pain is indescribable.
“You not only took Dorian’s life from him but also from us, stealing all future possibilities,” wrote Nicoya Walker. “We must envision a life without Dorian, discovering new purpose, hope and reasons to keep moving forward in a world where the defendant has revealed the presence of true evil.”
Walker said that she holds anger and grief over what happened.
“This reality arises from the understanding that neither justice nor regret can restore Dorian to us.”
Andrea Cooper, Carver’s cousin, said that they were a close family growing up.
“If one of us moved, we all moved,” she said. “We grew up in the same houses, the same streets, the same neighborhoods — all of our lives.”
She described her cousin, who enjoyed making music, as a “lovely soul” who made everyone laugh.
“We lost a lifetime of memories that were still left to make,” she said. ‘Even the good memories bring heart-aching pain.”
Cooper told the court that nothing will ever be the same for them.
“It’s all chaos and disorder as we try to make it through every minute of the day.”
Still, she continued, they work to stay together.
“Although Simmons took a huge part of our heart, I have faith that God will bring us through it and continue to keep our family strong like Dorian would have wanted us to be.”