19-year-old woman pleads guilty to fatal stabbing in brawl
A 19-year-old woman has pleaded guilty in the fatal stabbing of another teen during a Hunting Park brawl last year.
A 19-year-old woman has pleaded guilty in the fatal stabbing of another teen during a Hunting Park brawl last year.
Keyarra Frisby pleaded guilty last week to a felony charge of voluntary manslaughter and a misdemeanor charge of possession of an instrument of crime.
In the early-morning hours of July 5, Frisby, of Hunting Park, stabbed Anita Cotton, 17, in the neck during a melee outside a Walgreens on the 4200 block of North Broad Street, near Hunting Park Avenue.
Frisby is scheduled to be sentenced June 6 before Common Pleas Judge Lillian Ransom.
Assistant District Attorney Kristen Kemp said Tuesday that Frisby will face at least five to 10 years in state prison.
In exchange for Frisby's guilty plea last Thursday, prosecutors dropped a murder charge.
The fight that claimed Cotton's life began with an altercation on South Street following the Fourth of July fireworks, police have said.
Cotton and her friends got into an argument with another group of girls, including Frisby. Nearby police officers broke it up.
Not long after, the dispute started anew as the teens got off SEPTA's Broad Street Line at the Hunting Park station, and continued into a Walgreens parking lot.
Surveillance camera footage showed Cotton and Frisby grappling, clawing at each other's hair and face.
At one point, the video showed Frisby thrusting a sharp object upward into Cotton's neck.
Officers passing by about 3:15 a.m. saw the crowd and found Cotton lying on the pavement in a pool of blood. They took her to Einstein Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead just before 4 a.m.
Frisby has been in custody at the Riverside Correctional Facility in the city's Holmesburg section since her arrest last August.
This case was "sad for everyone," her defense attorney Joseph Schultz said in January.
Frisby, who had no prior convictions, was going to a trade school and had a 1-year-old daughter, he said.
Schultz said that after the South Street argument, Frisby got on the subway to go home. He said it was the victim and her group who followed Frisby on the subway.
Cotton's family told the Daily News at a vigil in July that Cotton had graduated from Northeast High and that she had a young daughter.
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