BOSTON, Nov. 22, 2016— The man who shot and killed 29-year-old Shawn Flores during a 2011 argument will not receive a new trial, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

In a decision released today, the Massachusetts Appeals Court affirmed the second-degree murder conviction of KENDRICK CLARK (D.O.B. 3/19/74) of Mattapan.  A Suffolk Superior Court jury in 2014 found Clark guilty of killing Flores during an altercation inside the Abbott Street rooming house where both men lived.

In the eight-page decision, the Appeals Court rejected Clark’s claim that the trial prosecutor made improper statements during his closing argument regarding the victim’s dying declaration that Clark had shot him.

“Contrary to the defendant’s assertions, we find that [this portion of the argument] was a fair response to defense counsel’s own argument that the defendant was the ‘one witness and one witness only, other than God as to what happened in that hallway,’” the justices wrote.

Clark additionally claimed that the judge presiding at his trial erred in his instructions to the jury and in allowing jurors to hear portions of Clark’s statements to Boston Police homicide detectives, which Clark argued were prejudicial for revealing “a form of crude ‘plea negotiations.’”  The justices rejected those arguments, as well, and found no merit to Clark’s claim that prosecutors withheld evidence.

“Although the defendant claims that there were ‘myriad instances of highly relevant and substantial evidence that had been withheld from the grand jury,’ he fails to identify that evidence or to explain why it was relevant and exculpatory,” the justices wrote.

During the course of a seven-day trial, prosecutors proved that on the night of Sept. 22, 2011, Clark and Flores became involved in a conflict inside the Abbott Street rooming house, during which Clark shot the victim multiple times in the chest.  Flores was mortally wounded but identified Clark as the assailant in a dying declaration.

Clark fled to North Carolina after the murder and was apprehended the following month by Boston Police and US Marshals.

Assistant District Attorney David Fredette, now chief of the DA’s Crime Strategies Bureau, prosecuted the case at trial.  Assistant District Attorney Cailin Campbell argued the case on appeal.  Kara Hayes was the DA’s assigned victim-witness advocate.  Clark was represented by William Smith.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.