THORNTON, Colo. — A homeless man who was charged in the fatal beating of another homeless man in Thornton in 2017 was sentenced to prison on Friday.
Brandon Lee Sugg, 25, was sentenced to 55 years behind bars in connection to the death of 47-year-old Brian McGreevy. Sugg called himself the “Angel of Death” on his Facebook profile.
On May 25, 2017, Thornton police found McGreevy lying in a puddle of blood in a cinderblock dumpster enclosure behind the Sunrise Village Shopping Center, located at 9071 Washington St. At the time, some homeless people, including Sugg and his girlfriend, had been living there.
Police determined McGreevy had been beaten to death with a baseball bat around midnight on May 24 after finding a bat with dried blood on it near a dumpster around 12400 Washington St.
Sugg’s girlfriend told police that he had admitted to hitting McGreevy over the head with a baseball bat multiple times, killing him, after an argument.
Two weeks before this attack — on May 6, 2017 — Sugg beat McGreevy with a tricycle over an argument on religion. This caused a brain hemorrhage and multiple facial fractures and other injuries that put the 47-year-old man in the hospital for 10 days. During an investigation, police found a bloody tricycle broken into multiple pieces in the same cinderblock enclosure where McGreevy was later murdered.
After the murder, Sugg fled Colorado. He was arrested in Arizona.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Kristen Baker said Sugg beat McGreevy almost to death on May 6 and came back to finish the job 18 days later.
“He struck Brian McGreevy with a baseball bat over and over again,” she said. “Injuries consistent with blows from a bat were too numerous to quantify in the autopsy report. Blood from the beating flew, either off the victim’s body or off the bat, onto every corner of the dumpster enclosure and halfway up the wall of the building nearby. The beating was at close range, intimate and intense.”
She asked for the maximum sentence and Adams County District Judge Tomee Crespin decided on 40 years for second-degree murder and 15 years for first-degree assault in the earlier attack.