Eyewitness in Akron murder trial threatened
Prosecutors produced an eyewitness Thursday who identified a 30-year-old Akron man accused in the shooting deaths of two people and the attempted murder of a man only hours earlier.
The shootings were at a home in the 1100 block of Grant Street on Thursday morning, Dec. 15 — during a period described by veteran police investigators as one of the most violent in the city’s history.
Nine people were shot, six fatally, during a six-day span, police said.
Dawud Spaulding of East Buchtel Avenue is facing the death penalty in the slayings of Ernie Thomas and Erica Singleton, the mother of Spaulding’s 7-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, and the shooting of Patrick Griffin that same day.
Griffin, who fell in a doorway leading to a side driveway of the orange-painted home, was so badly hurt responding officers who found him there said he could not speak a word.
“He was trying to talk, moving his mouth, but couldn’t,” one Akron officer told the jury Thursday morning.
Griffin is paralyzed.
The state contends that Spaulding went to Ernie Thomas’ home, looking for Singleton, shot Griffin first in the early morning darkness, about 2 a.m., and fled.
Some six hours later, prosecutors say, Spaulding returned and fatally shot Singleton and Thomas moments after they left the steps of his front porch.
Singleton, who was carrying an overnight bag at the time, had a protection order against Spaulding and was trying to hide when she was killed, prosecutors say.
After the lunch break Thursday, with no jury in the courtroom, Summit County Assistant Prosecutor Tom Kroll informed Judge Paul Gallagher that the eyewitness had received threats on his life in phone calls he received earlier in the day.
Kroll said the threats came from someone who had been “inside the courtroom” at some point — presumably as retaliation by a person close to the defendant.
Gallagher then resumed the proceedings, ensuring there were no spectators in the defendant’s section of the gallery, and the eyewitness took the stand.
He identified himself as a 41-year-old married father with children, who moved to Portage County in 1999 from Massachusetts.
The man said he moved from Portage to a home near Grant Street, where he had lived for about a year, and was on his way back home on the morning of Dec. 15 after dropping off one of his children at school.
While stopped at the corner of Stanton and Grant, the man said, he saw a man and woman walking down the front steps of the orange Grant Street home.
The woman, he said, “looked like she was carrying an overnight bag.”
A third person, a man walking down Grant with a dark-colored jacket and shoulder-length, tightly braided hair, then approached the home, he said.
When the woman with the overnight bag saw that man, the eyewitness said, “she stopped like dead in her tracks.”
At that point, he said, there was a heated argument between the two men near the driveway, and the man who had approached the home suddenly reached for something in his waistband, the eyewitness said.
It happened in maybe 15 seconds, he said.
As the eyewitness pulled away from the stop sign, he said he was about 50 feet down the road when he heard “a pop, pop.”
Some three minutes later, he said, “there were police cars just poring down Grant Street from all directions.”
Asked by Kroll if he could identify the person reaching toward his waistband, the eyewitness said he was sitting at the defense table between his two lawyers.
“He looks different, but I think it’s the gentlemen between [those] two,” the eyewitness said. “I don’t remember him wearing glasses.”
Spaulding was in court wearing silver-rimmed glasses, a white shirt, dark tie and dark slacks. And his hair is now short and closely trimmed.
Kroll later produced a police photo of Spaulding, with long braided hair, taken after his arrest.
When the eyewitness was shown a copy of the police photo on the witness stand, he said: “That’s the gentleman I saw that day.”
In an attempt to discredit the testimony, defense lawyer Doc Walker questioned the man at length and got him to admit he was a former heroin and marijuana user and, in fact, had been getting intensive treatment for heroin about a month before the shootings.
It is the defense’s position, confirmed by Walker and co-defense counsel Jason Wells, that police and prosecutors have the wrong man.
The Grant Street area, Walker said, is infested with illegal drug activity and other crimes.
There is so much criminal activity in that area, Walker said during a break in the proceedings, “you can’t really tell what might have happened there that day.”
The trial continues today. Closing arguments could be presented by the middle of next week.
http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/...tened-1.345182
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