A Prior Lake teenager will be sentenced in April after pleading guilty last month to aiding and abetting second-degree murder in the 2020 shooting death of a Burnsville teenager.
Braylen Justice Miller, 18, is set to be sentenced April 5 in Scott County District Court for his involvement in the killing. Sixteen-year-old Samuel Keezer died of a single gunshot wound to the head after meeting Miller to buy marijuana in Savage in late February 2020.
Taran Cortez Miller — Braylen Miller’s father who authorities say confessed to murdering Keezer during the drug sale — died in custody in December 2020. He was 44.
According to charging documents, Taran Miller told investigators he shot Keezer in the head inside their vehicle in the Target parking lot when he thought Keezer “was going to take the marijuana and run out of the car without paying.”
TanyaMarie Miller, who admitted to helping her husband cover-up the murder, pleaded guilty to two counts of aiding an offender. She’s expected to be released from prison in November.
In August 2020, a grand jury indicted both Braylen Miller and Taran Cortez Miller on first-degree murder charges.
Braylen Miller, who was 16 years old at the time of Keezer’s death, entered his guilty plea of aiding and abetting second-degree murder shortly before the planned start of his first-degree murder jury trial.
Under Minnesota’s felony murder law, prosecutors may bring first-degree murder charges against all accomplices to a felony-level crime that results in a murder, regardless of if the accomplice had any knowledge of such violence might take place.
