Syracuse, NY — A crime boss originally sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole for the murder of a Syracuse grandmother was instead paroled this month after an appellate court lowered his punishment.
John Couser, now 58, was sitting in a Rochester jail cell in 1997 when he sent a group of assassins to a residence on Syracuse’s Near West Side to kill a witness against him in an upcoming attempted murder trial.
But the target of his wrath wasn’t there. The hit men instead herded the target’s mother, 62-year-old Virginia Hackett, into the basement, along with her two teenage grandsons.
They covered the three with a blanket and shot them in the head as rap music played loudly on a radio. Hackett died from her injures.
Two of the hit men, James Stanback and Quentin Jenkins, pleaded guilty to their roles in the murder and cooperated against Couser at his trial.
County Court Judge Joseph Fahey said at Couser’s sentencing that he behaved “like some medieval despot with the power to decide who lives and dies.”
”Because of that megalomania, a Syracuse grandmother is dead, and her two grandsons were shot and left for dead,” Fahey added at the time of sentencing.
But Fahey’s sentence, which gave Couser no chance at parole, was eventually overturned.
In 2004, a Rochester appellate court found that it couldn’t have been proven at trial that Couser intended the grandmother to die.
The proof showed that Couser’s intended target was Hackett’s son, who was the actual witness to Couser’s attempted murder case. The assassins acted alone in deciding to kill the grandmother, the appellate court ruled, noting that Couser didn’t know of the grandmother’s death until some time after.