A Lexington Park man was sentenced to life plus life plus 20 years in prison, with 29 years of active incarceration, for his role in a May 2025 roadway shooting that wounded three men in Great Mills, St. Mary’s County State’s Attorney Jaymi Sterling announced Monday.
Peyton James Robert Curtis, 22, was convicted in March of two counts of attempted first-degree murder and two counts of using a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence, stemming from a targeted shooting on a moving vehicle in the early morning hours of May 3, 2025. The Honorable Joseph Stanalonis presided over the case, and Deputy State’s Attorney Alena Mosier prosecuted it on behalf of the county.
St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s deputies on patrol heard multiple gunshots near Chancellors Run Road and Pegg Road in Lexington Park around 2 a.m. that day and found a vehicle that had crashed onto the curb, its passenger side riddled with bullet holes. Two of the four occupants had gunshot wounds to their legs, a third suffered a graze wound, and the fourth escaped injury. Investigators determined the shooting followed an earlier confrontation between the victims and another group — including Curtis — at a gas station on Three Notch Road in California.
“The decision to escalate a verbal exchange into life-threatening gun violence put countless lives at risk,” Sterling said in a statement. “By pursuing another vehicle and opening fire on a busy roadway, the Defendant and his associates endangered innocent members of the public and demonstrated a complete disregard for human life and the safety of everyone nearby.”
Curtis was among five men ultimately charged in connection with the shooting. He and his brother, Cameron David Louis Curtis, then 22, of Valley Lee, were arrested within days of the shooting, on May 6, 2025, becoming the case’s first suspects. Investigators went on to charge Jayshawn Maurice Bartlett, 21, of Lexington Park, in August 2025 on 25 counts; Dequan Marquis Spicer, 24, of Great Mills, later that same month; and Kareem Tyree Harris, 22, also of Lexington Park, in October 2025, rounding out the five-person case. Detective Warren Forinash of the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office led the investigation, which relied on witness statements, surveillance footage and forensic analysis to identify each additional suspect over roughly six months.
Monday’s sentencing resolves the case against Peyton Curtis specifically; court records do not indicate that all four other defendants have yet been sentenced, and the case has moved through St. Mary’s County Circuit Court on separate tracks for each defendant since charges were filed last year.
Under Maryland law, attempted first-degree murder can carry a sentence of up to life in prison when prosecutors prove premeditation or intent to kill during commission of a felony, while a firearm-use conviction in a crime of violence adds a mandatory minimum sentence on top of the underlying charge. The stacked structure of Curtis’s sentence — two life terms plus 20 years, with 29 years required to be served before parole eligibility — reflects convictions on multiple separate counts arising from the same shooting.
The case drew sustained attention in St. Mary’s County over the past year as investigators worked through a chain of arrests connected to what officials described as a drive-by-style attack that grew out of a dispute the night before the shooting. Locally, coverage of the case has tracked each arrest as it occurred, from the Curtis brothers’ initial charges through Harris’s arrest nearly six months later, reflecting the scope of the investigation and the number of people ultimately held accountable.
Curtis was 20 years old at the time of the shooting and had been held without bond at the St. Mary’s County Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Leonardtown since his arrest, awaiting trial alongside his brother and, eventually, the other co-defendants as they were taken into custody over the following months.
None of the four surviving victims has been publicly identified, consistent with Maryland’s public information practices in cases involving crime victims. All were treated for their injuries and survived the shooting, a detail that kept the charges in the attempted-murder rather than homicide category throughout the prosecution.
