When Erica Vaughn learned she was pregnant with a boy, she knew she had to flee Baltimore.

“I left out of fear. I left because I loved my son before he even arrived, and I was determined to give him a fighting chance at something different,” Vaughn said. Baltimore was “a place where violence is often louder than love, and where young boys are hardened before they even have a chance to be whole.”

She delivered those remarks in a federal courtroom this week, standing just steps from her younger brother Ziyon Thompson, who was being sentenced for taking part in a fatal kidnapping-for-ransom in 2022, when he was 21 years old.

“My biggest heartbreak is that I couldn’t take Ziyon with me,” Vaughn, 27, said during the Tuesday court hearing, prompting a wail from another relative seated in the courtroom.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher sentenced Thompson to 22 years in federal prison for his role in the killing of Miguel Soto-Diaz, a 35-year-old father and marijuana grower from California. According to prosecutors, Thompson lured Soto-Diaz to an abandoned Southwest Baltimore row home and held him for ransom before he was killed.

Nearly three years after he was charged, relatives and supporters said they were still trying to square the brutal accusations with the young man they knew. Meanwhile, the victim’s widow, who had been pregnant at the time of his death, asked that the defendant be shown no mercy for destroying their family.

Thompson, now 24, sobbed throughout much of the proceedings.

After connecting with Soto-Diaz’s son on social media seeking to work together in the illegal drug business, Thompson had flown out to California and stayed at Soto-Diaz’s family home to survey his operation, according to prosecutors. Yet a month later, Thompson was sending a picture to Soto-Diaz’s family showing his hands and feet bound with zip ties and duct tape covering his mouth, demanding a courier send him 200 bags of marijuana and $50,000 cash, according to the plea agreement.

“... Send the bags and money so he can be ok and he said don’t call the police or he [won’t] be coming home,” Thompson said, according to prosecutors.

That same evening, Soto-Diaz was shot in the knees, groin and head and the rowhome set on fire, authorities said. Thompson, who pleaded guilty to taking part in the plot, maintains he was not present when the killing took place, and his defense attorneys said that contention was backed by cellphone location evidence showing Thompson had left the area about 90 minutes before the fire was reported.

Federal prosecutors said they’ve always believed Thompson did not act alone, noting Soto-Diaz was shot with two different guns.

And authorities recently disclosed to the defense that they have evidence pointing to a second suspect, who was believed to be a lookout when Soto-Diaz broke free and who was injured in the fatal altercation. No one else has been charged in the case.

Still, whatever his role, Thompson was still “legally and morally responsible” for felony murder and a stiff prison sentence, his attorneys conceded.

Assistant public defender Katherine Tang Newberger said from the first days of their representation that Thompson cried and expressed remorse for his role. Thompson’s judgment was clouded by his young age, she said, as well as peer pressure, drug use and ADHD.

“It doesn’t mean he’s not guilty,” Newberger said. “But it does go to what’s the appropriate punishment.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia McLane asked Gallagher to impose 25 years, saying the evidence showed Thompson had “at best” methodically carried out the kidnapping plot and left Soto-Diaz tied up with other captors.

In the days leading up to the abduction, he obtained a burner cellphone to communicate with Soto-Diaz’s family that he ditched after the killing. If he felt badly about what happened, he didn’t show it, McLane said.

During the ransom negotiations, Thompson mocked the Soto-Diaz family’s immigration status over text messages shown in court. Just before his arrest, he posted boastful images to social media showing him brandishing firearms, she said.

“The idea that May 8 [the date of the murder] was an aberration is not borne out in how he conducted himself,” McLane said.

Soto-Diaz’s wife, whose identity was not revealed at the court sentencing, did not appear in person at Tuesday’s sentencing. Instead, McLane read a statement, translated from Spanish, written by her.

In her own comments at the hearing patched in through a telephone call, she said adolescence was no excuse for what Thompson had done to her husband.

“I blame you directly for Miguel’s death,” she said through a translator.

The courtroom was filled with fez-wearing relatives and other supporters who are members of Baltimore’s Moorish Science community. Among them was Thompson’s father who said he had led a successful life after earlier running afoul of the law.

“I’m living proof that resurrection is a fact,” Eric Thompson-Bey said.

But he said he blamed himself for his son’s predicament, saying that when Ziyon was acting out at age 17, he kicked him out of the house, thinking he would be “scared straight.”

“I threw him to the wolves,” he lamented.

Ziyon Thompson told the court he has already earned his GED behind bars, and enjoys working in the prison kitchen as a line cook.

He addressed the judge, apologizing for the “tragedy I put in motion” and saying he was a “dumb kid taking a lot of drugs that clouded my mind” while maintaining Soto-Diaz’s death was never his intention.

“I let everybody down,” he said.