[PHOTO LINK BELOW] Staten Island, NY – A Midland Beach ex-con will spend at least 20 years behind bars for killing a popular Grant City liquor store owner as was reported on YWN.

John Lanorith, 42, of Kiswick Street, was sent to prison for 20 years to life under a plea deal to second-degree murder in the shooting death of Elgudzha Koyenishvili Z”L during a holdup inside Discount Wines & Liquors on Lincoln Avenue in May 2008.

“This was a cruel murder of a well-respected store owner,” Justice Stephen J. Rooney said during today’s sentencing at state Supreme Court, St. George.

Lanorith, dressed in a shirt and tie, opted not to make a statement on his own behalf.

His attorney, Manuel Ortega, said Lanorith was “deeply regretful for his actions that day.”

Lanorith walked into the store at about 8:15 p.m. on May 21, 2008, brandished a gun and demanded money. When Koyenishvili pulled out a bat and swung it to defend himself, Lanorith shot the 67-year-old Russian immigrant twice in the chest.

Lanorith then fled in a blue pickup truck with the store’s cash register.

A female friend, Phyllis Ciesienski-Cicinia, allegedly took the register from the back of a car in a Grasmere parking lot and drove to Jersey City where she dumped it.

Lanorith was arrested the following day, and police recovered the cash register from a large trash bin.

Koyenishvili, of New Springville, was a neighborhood mainstay for more than 10 years.

Speaking on behalf of the family during the sentencing hearing, Koyenishvili’s son Zaza Cohen said his father “came to this country to follow a dream.”

Koyenishvili was gunned down, Cohen added, a few days before his grandson was born.

“My father died just before the dream of his life was going to come true,” Cohen said.

“The only thing we want,” Cohen added, “is that [Lanorith] be reminded every day for the rest of his life what he took away from us.”

Assistant District Attorney Kelly Carroll, who prosecuted the case with Assistant District Attorney Wanda DeOliveira, listed three separate convictions dating back to 1991 — each on counts of burglary — that put Lanorith behind bars after police found his fingerprints at several home-invasion sites.

Ms. Carroll drew a parallel between the progression of forensics over the past 20 years and Lanorith’s progressive pattern of crime.

“Forensics have changed for the better,” Ms. Carroll said, “the defendant, for the worst.”

YWN PHOTO LINK: Click on the following link for photos of Misaskim volunteers at the scene of the murder: http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=33002

(Source: SI Live)