The prosecution ended with a 50-year sentence, but the public story began with one brother’s fear and one friend’s search for an answer.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Before Jer Auntey Pleasant was sentenced on four felony convictions, the case entered public view through two deeply personal moments: a brother saying he believed Larry Wilson “was set up” and a friend peering through a window to check on Joseph West.
Those moments still define why the case landed so hard in San Antonio. Prosecutors said Pleasant used Grindr to arrange meetings with the two men on consecutive days in April 2023, then killed them. By March 2026, the case had grown beyond the two murders to include an aggravated robbery and the aggravated sexual assault of a child, giving the sentencing hearing the weight of a broader reckoning over several violent acts.
Wilson, 54, was the first victim in the sequence. Police said he went to the Banyan Tree Apartments near Loop 410 late on April 14, 2023, after communicating on Grindr with someone using the name “Derek.” He arrived in a white Ford SUV. Witnesses later described a man in a red hoodie or jacket at the passenger side of the vehicle moments before several shots were fired. Wilson was found dead in the driver’s seat. In the days that followed, his family spoke publicly about the loss in human terms, not forensic ones. Johnny Wilson, his brother, told local television, “I feel in my heart he was set up.” That quote did not solve the case, but it sharpened its emotional center. For relatives, the killing looked less like random street violence than a planned betrayal carried out under the cover of an arranged meeting.
West’s death unfolded in a different register, quieter at first and then suddenly irreversible. On April 15, 2023, after a friend had not heard from him for days, concern led to a trip to his apartment in the Medical Center area. Looking in through a bedroom window, the friend saw what was described as a foot hanging off the bed. Officers, with help from firefighters, entered and found West dead from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Public summaries of the case said West was 22 at sentencing, though some early local reports listed him as 21 at the time of the killing. However the age was recorded, the public narrative around his death began not with a shootout or a chase but with silence, worry and a welfare check that ended in a homicide investigation. That difference in how the two killings surfaced made the combined case feel both sprawling and intimate.
Only after those two deaths were publicly known did the investigative links emerge. Detectives said they found Grindr communications leading to the first meeting, fingerprint evidence tied to Pleasant at both crime scenes and matching ballistics evidence showing the same gun was used in both killings. One detail repeated in local reporting was especially striking: Pleasant’s fingerprint was found on condom wrappers recovered at each scene. Police also said his fingerprints were found inside West’s vehicle. Those details gave prosecutors a way to bridge two very different crime scenes and argue that the same suspect had used the same method twice in two days. The evidence also let investigators move quickly from the grief of separate families to a single prosecutable theory.
When prosecutors later described Pleasant’s broader record, they argued that the killings were part of a longer pattern. They said he had committed an aggravated robbery in March 2022 after meeting another person on the same app and had sexually assaulted a 13-year-old child in July 2022, with DNA evidence identifying him in that case. Judge Kristina Escalona eventually sentenced him to four concurrent 50-year prison terms. District Attorney Joe Gonzales said the result would never restore the lives that were lost but marked a step toward justice. The court’s decision did not erase the way the victims first entered the public record, however. Wilson remains tied in public memory to his brother’s suspicion that the meeting was a trap, while West’s case remains tied to the image of a friend arriving because ordinary contact had suddenly stopped.
The sentence leaves some questions outside the public record, including what exactly happened in the final minutes before West was shot and whether the second killing also involved robbery. But it settles the legal question that drove the prosecution. As of now, the case stands as two deaths on consecutive days, one defendant, and one punishment that prosecutors said accounted for both the murders and the earlier violent offenses.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.