Prosecutors said the same digital and forensic pattern tied Jer Auntey Pleasant to two separate killings arranged through Grindr.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — The case that sent Jer Auntey Pleasant to prison for 50 years turned on a simple investigative pattern repeated twice: a dating app conversation, a private meeting, a shooting and evidence left behind that police said pointed back to the same man.
That pattern mattered because detectives were not dealing with one isolated homicide. By the time the case reached sentencing in March 2026, prosecutors had tied Pleasant to the murders of Larry Wilson and Joseph West, as well as an earlier aggravated robbery and a child sexual assault case. The record they described showed how separate pieces of evidence from different places and dates were used to build one broader prosecution.
The first break came from a phone. After Wilson was shot to death in his white Ford SUV near the Banyan Tree Apartments on April 14, 2023, investigators gained access to his iPhone and found explicit Grindr messages with a user calling himself “Derek.” Police said the messages laid out the meeting location and even included the suspect’s statement that he would be wearing a red jacket. That detail mattered because witnesses at the complex described seeing a man in a red hoodie or red jacket at the passenger side of Wilson’s vehicle moments before shots were fired. Wilson’s last communication, according to early local reporting on the affidavit, came minutes before the first emergency call. In a case built on fast-moving contact between strangers, the phone gave detectives a near real-time account of how the meeting was set up.
The second break came from objects small enough to miss at first glance. Investigators reported finding Pleasant’s fingerprint on condom wrappers at both homicide scenes. In West’s case, police also said his fingerprints were found inside the victim’s vehicle. Those traces were significant not only because they placed Pleasant at both locations, but because they did so in two very different settings: an outdoor scene around a vehicle and an indoor scene inside an apartment. Then came the firearms evidence. Police recovered a single 9 mm shell casing in West’s apartment and compared it with evidence from Wilson’s killing. Ballistics testing, according to prosecutors and local stations, showed the same firearm was used in both shootings. At that point, the investigation moved from parallel suspicion to a connected case, giving detectives physical evidence, digital communications and witness descriptions that all pointed in the same direction.
Only after that forensic spine was in place did the chronology of the two killings become clearer. Wilson, 54, had gone to the Cross Creek apartment complex late on April 14 for a meeting arranged through the app. Witnesses told police the gunman fired several times, grabbed a black duffel bag and ran. The following day, concern over West’s silence brought a friend to his apartment on Von Scheele Drive in the Medical Center area. Looking through a window, the friend saw a foot hanging off the bed and called 911. Firefighters helped officers get inside, where West was found dead from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. The stark difference between the two scenes — one public enough for witnesses, one private enough to require a welfare check — gave the case its shock, but prosecutors said the evidence underneath both deaths looked strikingly similar.
At sentencing, the prosecution widened the frame beyond April 2023. Officials said Pleasant had already used the same app in March 2022 to meet another victim, then shot that person during an aggravated robbery attempt. They also said DNA evidence tied him to the July 2022 aggravated sexual assault of a 13-year-old child. Judge Kristina Escalona sentenced Pleasant on all four convictions to concurrent 50-year terms. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said the ruling was the product of tireless work by law enforcement and prosecutors and called it a step toward justice for the victims and their loved ones. Because the terms run concurrently, the formal sentence is effectively 50 years, even though news accounts often described it as four 50-year terms or 200 years in combined punishment.
The case also left unresolved points that often remain after conviction. Prosecutors did not publicly detail every interaction that preceded the second killing, and public summaries did not fully explain whether West was killed during a robbery, after a sexual encounter, or under some other circumstance. Nor did public reporting answer whether Pleasant acted entirely alone in each step of the setup. Still, the evidence trail made those unanswered questions less important to the verdict than the hard links detectives said they could prove. For Wilson’s family, the emotional reading came sooner than the forensic one. His brother, Johnny Wilson, told a local station, “I feel in my heart he was set up,” a statement that captured what relatives believed long before the case reached final sentence.
The public case now stands on a documented sequence of chats, prints and shell casings that prosecutors said connected two killings across two days. Unless an appeal or post-conviction challenge changes the record, that evidence trail is likely to remain the core narrative of how the case was solved.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.