While his older brother, Jesse, was in prison, Zackary Sullivan used to send him his allowance. Even as a kid, he wanted to share everything he had with the people he loved. 

When Jesse was paroled in November of 2023, Zackary and brother Rory Sullivan were elated to see him, their mother said, eager to show him how great life could be outside of a correctional facility.

Less than two months after nineteen-year-old Zackary had picked Jesse up from prison, Jesse shot him in the back of the head as the three rode in Rory’s pickup truck, plowing driveways. 

 “He was so good to you,” Audrey Moran said to stepson Jesse Sullivan  in Merrimack Superior Court Wednesday morning. “How could someone who always talked of brotherly loyalty… take his brother’s life?” 

As she spoke, Moran’s voice was shaky. Behind her, friends of Zackary and members of their family dabbed away tears. 

“I've shown up to every court hearing hoping to see any remorse in your eyes. Not once have I,” she said. “I hate you for taking my son.”

Alexis Cahill, Zackary’s older sister, addressed Sullivan firmly.  

“You don't have many people left in your corner. You killed one of the very few that was left,” she said. “I just hope you know that he died loving you, Jesse.”

Sullivan was sentenced to 53 years to life for the murder of his half-brother, among other charges. As Moran and other loved ones spoke to the court, Sullivan looked at them without much emotion, his face hidden behind rectangular glasses and a dark surgical mask. Throughout the hearing, he was restless, swiveling back and forth in his chair or swaying from foot to foot. 

His attorney, Jeremy Clemans, noted that Sullivan requested a longer sentence than prosecutors initially offered during plea negotiations. Sullivan had taken responsibility for his actions, Clemans said.

He will be in his mid-eighties before he is eligible for parole. 

When Moran met Zackary and Jesse’s father, Daniel Sullivan, in the late 1990s, she had one child and he had five. Jesse was a dimpled, brown-eyed six-year-old. She helped him get custody, and Rory was born in 2000. When Daniel spent two years in jail in 2001, Moran became a 20-year-old single mother of seven. 

“Most girls dream of their wedding day, but I settled for a jail chapel to keep you and your siblings together,” she said. “It would have been so much easier to just pack up my two kids and leave, but I wanted to give you what you had never had, and that was stability.” 

When Jesse Sullivan was paroled in 2023, he’d spent his adult and teen years in and out of prison or in the state’s Youth Development Center. 

Moran was shocked at the abruptness of his release from state custody: Jesse was “overwhelmed at the simplest thought of fending for [himself],” she said. “I was shocked the Department of Corrections did not help you transition to the community.”

She worried about what that would mean for her sons.

When Zackary and Jesse were involved in a fight just two days later, that put warrants out for their arrest, her fears were confirmed. She worked with Zackary to get an attorney, and tried to impress on him just how much he had to lose by staying so attached to Jesse. But he saw his brother as a hero who had protected him, Moran said. 

By contrast, Jesse, who had yet to be arrested on the charge, believed his brother had given police information about him. It wasn’t true. 

On the night of January 16, 2024, the three brothers were plowing driveways as part of a business owned by Rory. 

When stopped at a red light on Airport Road, Jesse rolled down the window and fired a shot into a nearby home. The couple living there was unharmed.

Rory began to argue with Jesse as Zackary sat silently in the back seat. 

After clearing snow at another home, Jesse had Zackary switch seats with him, so that he sat behind. According to prosecutors, the shot into the back of Zackary’s head at close range killed him almost instantly. 

Rory called the police, who met them at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Manchester Street.

Jesse fled on foot. He was arrested hours later outside a neighboring apartment building. Police found a gun hidden in the snow outside the building, owned by a friend of Jesse’s who he’d stayed with recently, loaded with bullets matching those found in Zackary’s brain and in the wall at the Airport Road home. 

Even with her concerns about her step-son, the call from Rory bewildered and devastated Moran. 

Daniel Sullivan died in 2016, when Zackary was 12, and he stepped up as “father-brother,” in their blended family, she said. He taught his younger siblings how to cook and brought them to dance rehearsal if Moran was away. 

He graduated high school early, started a car detailing business and bought a three-bedroom home, all before he turned 19. 

But, she said, he was still “a momma’s boy.” They spoke on the phone eight to ten times a day. He’d pay ahead for her at a drive-thru or a toll booth. 

In Superior Court on Wednesday, Judge John Kissinger described the murder as a senseless, brutal act of violence.

He acknowledged that Jesse Sullivan’s request to serve a longer sentence than initially offered to him was unusual. He also found it appropriate. 

While the 33-year old will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison, Kissinger said, “there is an opportunity for rehabilitation, even in that setting.” He urged Sullivan to pursue it. 

Outside the sentencing, Zackary’s family had no further comment other than to express profound gratitude to the victim advocate’s office. 

In a statement read by her mother, Zackary’s younger sister Maci repeated how much she would miss him. 

“When I felt like I had no one, I always knew you were there,” she said. “Jesse, I hope you see what you have done. I will always wonder why.”