ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - A St. Louis man was sentenced Thursday to a decade in prison after admitting his involvement in a 2017 double homicide in the Carondelet neighborhood.
Darnell Rogers, 29 received a 10-year term after pleading guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of first-degree robbery and four counts of armed criminal action in relation to the death of two individuals in the Carondelet neighborhood.
In October 2017, Megan Nieder, 24 and Joseph Finger, 40, were found shot in the 200 block of Bellerive Boulevard. Witnesses told authorities that Finger had had several thousand dollars in cash on him, but police found no money at the shooting scene.
Police found 9mm and .22-caliber shell casings at the crime scene, charges said.
Cellphone records said Finger had received a call from Rogers the night before.
Rogers was charged with a robbery in St. Louis County a few days after Nieder and Finger's deaths.
While serving a prison sentence for that robbery, Rogers called relatives to ask them to get rid of a black purse that was in the basement of his parents' home, charges said.
After learning of the calls, police got a search warrant, seized the purse and matched it with the strap found at the shooting scene. The purse also had Finger's DNA on it.
The sentence will run concurrently with his 10-year sentence for the St. Louis County case.
Before sentencing Rogers, the judge said in court that he didn't like the negotiated plea agreement but would accept it because the lawyers better understood the case's strengths and weaknesses.
