Mom Of West Chester Teen Fatally Shot Is Awarded $3.4M: UPDATE

WEST CHESTER, PA —A judge awarded $3.4 million to the mother of a Chester County teen shot to death in the summer of 2017 in a road rage incident on Route 100 in West Goshen Township.

Chester County Judge Jeffrey R. Sommer issued the award to Michelle Boyer, the mother of Bianca Roberson, 18, who was shot in the head on June 28, 2017.

In 2019, Maria C. Janoski, a West Chester attorney, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against David Desper, 34, who is serving up to 40 years in state prison in the death of Roberson.

The judge said the monetary award was for the wrongful death and the estimated income Roberson could have earned during her lifetime.

A non-jury trial was held on Oct. 13. Boyer, other relatives, and an expert witness testified during the trial. Depser participated via video from prison. He did not testify or present witnesses.

Fight to end gun violence

Boyer was among over 400 advocates rallying in June 2022 in West Chester to end gun violence in Pennsylvania.

The rally followed the May 24, 2022 massacre in Texas in which 18 children and two adults were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde.

“I am broken,” Boyer said at the rally. “There are a lot of broken parents. Those 19 parents in Texas are aching. I know their pain. The pain is indescribable.”

Boyer said she is especially angered when she hears people say that guns don’t kill people, people do.

“We have to continue to do this until someone in the White House says ‘We had enough’,” she said at the rally for gun safety.

The fatal shooting in West Goshen

Roberson, a Bayard Rustin High School graduate, was driving home on Route 100, north of Route 202 when she was shot in the head.

At the time of her death, Roberson worked at a retirement village as a dietary aid. She had aspirations of "saving the world," according to her obituary.

She was looking forward to going to Jacksonville University to study criminal justice with the hope of working as an FBI agent.

Her death was followed by a four-day manhunt. On July 2, 2017, Desper turned himself in to the West Goshen police, according to a Patch report.

Desper of Trainer, a borough in Delaware County, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced in December 2018 to 20 to 40 years in state prison.

Desper is in the state Correctional Institution at Phoenix, a maximum security prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County.