Two men sat in a Pittsburg jail, each with a deep secret: One was a murder suspect, the other an undercover cop

PITTSBURG — Locked up in a city jail here in 2023, Desante Blake badly needed a friend.

Sixteen years earlier, he and another man had accosted 32-year-old Larry Abercrombie Sr. during an attempted robbery at Abercrombie’s Pittsburg home. During the ensuing struggle, Abercrombie was shot in the chest and killed.

In the years since, Blake had excelled at life, becoming a role model to younger siblings and a supervisor for a contractor in the environmental health and safety field. He had saved enough to buy his own house and called his mother, beaming with pride to tell her about it, court records show.

But the past has a way of catching up. Weeks before he ended up in city jail, police raided Blake’s Antioch home and seized guns. On June 7, 2023, they returned with a murder warrant. Now here he was, a potential life sentence hanging over his head, sitting in a Pittsburg holding cell with one other man. As the two chatted, Blake’s companion would serve as his spiritual mentor, giving him advice on legal matters and a shoulder to cry on.

“This is not good,” Blake told his companion, according to court records. “F— dude. I really just f—ed up, man.”

“You’ll be alright, man,” his jailhouse companion replied. “Just ask God for forgiveness, man. At the end of the day, you have to sit there and think about this … You just ask for forgiveness for everything you’ve done or somebody’s life got lost there. You don’t know if that person had a wife or kids or shit like that. You know?”

“Yeah,” Blake replied, according to court records.

Blake would find out later that the man he was speaking with had his own secret: He wasn’t another arrestee, but an undercover agent equipped with a listening device and placed there to obtain a confession. As they talked, Blake kept his answers short, but said just enough to demonstrate firsthand knowledge of Abercrombie’s killing, court records show.

“Did that fool every try to pull something on you, or he had something that you can use, or he tried to choke you?” the cellmate/undercover cop asked, apparently referring to Abercrombie.

“He tried to. Yeah,” Blake responded.

“There it is. Tell your lawyer that motherf—er tried to f—ing hit you,” the agent said. “You know?”

“Right,” Blake said.

These types of set ups are known as “Perkins Operations” — a callback to the U.S. Supreme Court case that affirmed their legality. They were once controversial, but in 1990 the court upheld the Illinois conviction for a man who’d confessed to an undercover cop posing as a jail inmate. The decision found that such confessions aren’t afforded the Miranda rights protections typical of police interrogations, because they’re done outside the context of an “official interrogation” in a “police-dominated atmosphere.”

Prosecutors charged Blake with murder that same week. In the end, he would accept a plea deal with two felonies — attempted robbery and manslaughter — for a 23-year sentence. In a news release, Pittsburg police announced the plea deal last year, chalking the resolution up to a DNA match and ballistics evidence.

But the heart-to-heart between Blake and an undercover agent that sewed the case tight, were left out. Those dramatic details had not publicly surfaced — until now.

In character letters to the court, Blake’s family and friends offered high praise and endorsements for the “exceptional individual” they described, many adding they were shocked he was suspected in a homicide.

“He has always been a valuable asset to anything he has been a part of,” his “dear friend” Rachel Buie wrote in one letter. “He is reliable, responsible and always willing to go above and beyond to help others.”

Even as he’d moved on with his life, Blake had held onto a physical reminder from his past. It was a Springfield pistol, tucked in a jacket pocket, sitting in a closet at Blake’s Antioch home. In April 2023, police had showed up there with a warrant and discovered the pistol along with multiple assault weapons, court records show.

The discovery blew the cold case homicide investigation wide open. Testing confirmed it was the very same weapon used to kill Abercrombie on June 8, 2007. Police said at the time that Abercrombie was killed at night outside his home on the 200 block of South Catamaran Circle in Pittsburg.

A defense motion theorizes that he was targeted for being a “mid-level drug dealer” and that police found methamphetamine in the home that night. Other court filings say Abercrombie’s then 12-year-old son witnessed his dad being killed and told police that his father attempted to fight off one of the robbers, who shot him in the chest.

That physical struggle is what gave police a chance to solve the crime; it turned out that during the scuffle, a bit of Blake’s DNA had rubbed off onto Abercrombie’s sweater. This wouldn’t become known to police until 2023, when cold case investigators took a fresh look at the crime and re-tested available evidence. When they did, Blake’s DNA showed up, and police realized they’d seized a box for a Springfield pistol from his residence while serving a search warrant in an unrelated 2010 investigation, according to court records.

Detectives wondered if it were possible that Blake could have held onto the suspected murder weapon for all that time. By June 2023, they had their answer, with a ballistics test that matched it to a casing from the homicide scene. As Blake sat in the Pittsburg cell nearly 16 years to the day after he’d killed Abercrombie, authorities provided him with that ballistics report, which he read aloud to the undercover agent, court records show.

“‘Submitted cartridge case was identified as having been filed in the Springfield Armory pistol.’ Oh, wow,” Blake said. The undercover agent explained to him that it meant they matched it from a “test fire.”

“So either way, you try to stay away from it, your gun’s there and they have you there,” the agent explained.

“I’m f—ed,” Blake responded.

“Yeah, basically,” then agent replied, according to the partial transcript.

Now 42, Blake is currently housed at High Desert State Prison in Susanville. His accomplice has never been identified or charged, authorities said.