Man who once faced murder charge as a teen now faces attempted-murder charge for Roxbury shooting

Boston Police report arresting a former Dorchester man now living in Rockland with shooting somebody on Cheney Street in Roxbury on April 17.

Winston McGhee, 36, was arrested yesterday evening after a short foot chase on Abbott Street in Dorchester, about a mile from the shooting scene, police say. Earlier this month, the BPD gang unit arrested a second man, Jermaine Grant of Jamaica Plain, for the shooting as well. The victim, who got himself to a trauma center, survived.

McGhee was charged with armed assault with intent to murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a dwelling, carrying a loaded firearm, unlawful possession of a firearm (second and subsequent offense) and unlawful possession of ammunition.

He was also charged as a Level 3 armed career criminal, which could mean a longer sentence - by 15 to 20 years - if convicted on the other charges, based on a criminal record that dates to his teens.

In 2008, a federal jury convicted McGhee of selling crack on Martha's Vineyard. He was sentenced to 8 years in federal prison, although an appeals court reduced that to 5 years, after determining his trial judge should not have used his juvenile record in determining how long a sentence he should get, specifically, his conviction for a 1999 case, when he was 15, in which he and a pal held somebody up with a shotgun, according to a federal sentencing memorandum in the case.

His 2006 crack arrest, in his Oak Bluffs hotel room at the height of the summer season, came 28 days after Suffolk County prosecutors decided to end the first-degree murder case against him for the 2002 shooting murder of Antwon Leslie, after a key witness refused to testify. At the time of the murder, in which Leslie was shot in the back, McGhee was 18.

When he was indicted for the murder, McGhee was on probation for the juvenile case of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, according to federal prosecutors on the case, who called him "a dangerous, violent, repeat offender."

His attorney in the crack case, however, asked for leniency, saying McGhee was the product of a broken home - his mother and later his stepmother both used crack and his father was a heavy drinker. His mother started giving him pot to smoke when he was just 9, and he became a drug addict himself, one who never got the sort of treatment and counseling that might have helped him with his emotional and behavioral disorders and turned his life around, his lawyer wrote.

In 2018, McGhee was charged with OUI - and with giving a false ID to police - after allegedly driving into an unoccupied State Police cruiser on the side of I-93 in Braintree.

Innocent, etc.