A federal judge last week sentenced Aizavier Roache, 31, of Roxbury, to more than four years in prison for selling at least six guns that he obtained from a source who bought them at gun shops in South Carolina.

One of those guns was used in a double shooting on Humphreys Street in Dorchester’s Uphams Corner neighborhood shortly after midnight on May 10, 2023, that left a man with gunshot wounds to his chest, hip and ankle, and a woman with a gunshot wound to her arm, according to federal prosecutors.

The shooter had bought the gun from Roache just 15 days earlier.

Police ultimately recovered several other guns that he sold from people without licenses, including at least one member of a local gang.

Roache pleaded guilty in October to conspiracy to traffic firearms over a three-year gun-buying spree. The South Carolina man who bought the guns that Roache re-sold in Boston, Trevon Brunson, has also pleaded guilty. He is scheduled for sentencing next month.

The two first came to the attention of federal authorities when Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm (ATF) agents interviewed Brunson, who acknowledged selling guns to a man he claimed to only know as “Boston.” Investigators started taking a closer look at the pair after Boston Police recovered the gun used in the Uphams Corner shooting and traced it back to South Carolina, according to court filings.

Assistant US Attorney Luke Goldworm had urged US District Court Judge Leo Sorokin imprison Roache for 70 months not just because of the harm done by the guns but because, while awaiting trial or sentencing at a federal detention facility in Rhode Island, Roache began selling marijuana to other inmates. Prosecutors say he also beat a fellow inmate suspected of cooperating with the feds.

Also, while he was not charged for it, he was implicated - including in texts and videos on his own phone - of supplementing his gun income by cooking and selling crack, Goldworm wrote.

Roache’s attorney, Joshua Hanye, urged a sentence of 48 months. He said Roache acknowledged he did wrong, he had a loving mother and stepfather to help guide him into a productive and legal life and that prosecutors were wrongly stating Roache should be blamed, via sentencing, for dozens of guns, when he only admitted to selling six.

Also, he grew up in lower Roxbury and the neighboring South End, which were “filled with drugs and crime” and he had a father absent from his life because he was addicted to drugs, all of which led him to seek out “older males in the neighborhood,” even as he was struggling with a learning disability and the fact that other kids in the neighborhood constantly picked on him because he had a speech impediment and weight problems.

–REPORTER STAFF