The final sentence covered two murders, an earlier aggravated robbery and the sexual assault of a child.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — When a Texas judge sentenced Jer Auntey Pleasant to four concurrent 50-year prison terms, the courtroom outcome covered more than two back-to-back killings. Prosecutors presented it as punishment for a sequence of violent crimes that stretched from 2022 into 2023.
That broader frame is what makes this story larger than a single murder case. The public first learned about Pleasant through April 2023 homicide charges, but by the time of sentencing in March 2026, prosecutors said the evidence showed a recurring method in which meetings arranged or enabled through a dating app led to violence. The sentence joined the murders of Larry Wilson and Joseph West with convictions for aggravated robbery and aggravated sexual assault of a child.
The timeline prosecutors outlined began in March 2022. They said Pleasant met a victim through Grindr and shot that person during an aggravated robbery attempt. Public summaries released at sentencing did not name that victim, but officials described the case as an early example of the same approach later seen in the murder prosecutions: a meeting made through an app, a private encounter and sudden violence. Then, in July 2022, prosecutors said Pleasant sexually assaulted a 13-year-old child. They said DNA evidence identified him in that case. Those two convictions mattered at sentencing because they let prosecutors argue that the 2023 murders were not standalone acts but part of a mounting record of violent behavior spanning different victims and different charges.
The murders that made the case widely known happened on consecutive days in April 2023. On April 14, Larry Wilson, 54, went to the Banyan Tree Apartments off Cross Creek near Loop 410 after chatting on Grindr with a user named “Derek,” according to police affidavits described in local news reports. Witnesses said a man in a red jacket or hoodie fired multiple shots into Wilson’s white Ford SUV and fled with a black duffel bag. On April 15, Joseph West was found dead in his apartment in the Medical Center area after a friend asked for a welfare check. He had been shot in the back of the head. The killings happened in different settings and came to police in different ways, yet prosecutors said both fit the same evolving pattern they had been piecing together from the earlier cases.
Investigators then built the connective tissue that prosecutors would later rely on in court. Police said Wilson’s phone contained messages arranging the first meeting. Pleasant’s fingerprints were reported on condom wrappers recovered from both homicide scenes, and his fingerprints were also said to be inside West’s vehicle. A 9 mm shell casing recovered in West’s apartment was later matched by ballistics testing to evidence from Wilson’s killing. That evidence allowed detectives to connect two deaths separated by less than a day and charge Pleasant with two counts of murder. Early booking records cited by local outlets showed he was arrested around 10 p.m. on April 23, 2023, and held on bonds totaling $700,000.
The sentencing itself put a legal end point on that sequence. Judge Kristina Escalona of the 186th District Court imposed four 50-year terms that run concurrently. Some reports described the outcome as 200 years because the terms total that amount on paper, but because they are concurrent, Pleasant faces an effective 50-year sentence. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said the ruling reflected the work of prosecutors and law enforcement and called it a step toward justice for victims and their families. The court’s final package also shows how prosecutors chose to resolve the case publicly: not by isolating each crime into separate narratives, but by presenting one line of conduct running across years.
That framing leaves both clarity and limits. It clarifies why prosecutors emphasized the app-based robbery from 2022 when discussing the 2023 murders. It also leaves some unanswered questions in the public record, including whether warning signs in the earlier cases were visible before the two killings and what precise evidence or procedural steps moved the older charges and murder counts onto the same sentencing track. Still, the official account now centers on continuity. In that version of events, the April murders were the most visible crimes, but not the first signs of danger.
As of April 2, 2026, the case stands as a single prosecution narrative covering four convictions over roughly four years. The next public milestone would likely come only if Pleasant files post-conviction motions or an appeal that tests how that record was assembled and upheld.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.