Staff Photo/Ed Runyan Brandon Crump Jr.'s attorney, Lou DeFabio, listens during Monday's hearing in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, with Assistant County Attorney Mike Jacobone sitting below DeFabio. The trial will resume this morning.
YOUNGTOWN – Monday's testimony, in which investigators and scientists from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation collaborated, used scientific evidence to link Brandon Crump Jr. to the scene of the Sept. 21, 2020, fatal shooting. Focused on high-tech methods.
Rowan Sweeney's
Four.
Crump, 21, is on trial on charges of aggravated murder, four counts of attempted murder and numerous other charges in Rowan's death and the shooting deaths of four adults at a Struthers home.
The trial resumes this morning before Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Dapolito.
Four witnesses examined the phones and call records of people involved in the incident, revealing photos, text messages, call records and cell phone locations at various times before and after the 1:50 a.m. gun attack. He testified that he did so. Authorities believe the shooting started as a robbery.
Prosecutors said in opening statements last week that co-defendant Andre McCoy Jr. extorted thousands of dollars from Yarnell Green from then-girlfriend Cassandra Marsicola inside their Perry Street home early on September 21. He said there were text messages indicating that he had sent a text message saying he was going to rob him. cash. Prosecutors allege Green left money on the table and McCoy texted co-defendant Kimoney Bryant to arrange the robbery.
McCoy, Marsicola, Green and Rowan's mother, Alexis Schneider, were all victims of gunfire when a man came through the front door and shot everyone, including Rowan.
Prosecutors said photos taken from Crump's cell phone showed a man wearing a red sleeve holding a large amount of cash within an hour of the shooting. Data from the cellphone also yielded a week-old video of a handgun similar to the one used in the shooting, according to testimony Monday.
Prosecutors said last week that cell phone tower data showed Crump and Bryant were at the Perry Street home at the exact time of the shooting, and that Bryant was in Youngstown an hour before the shooting. It is believed that he was in the area.
Much of Monday's testimony was an effort to substantiate those claims.
One of the witnesses Monday was Michelle Smith, an analyst with the Ohio HIDTA Drug Trafficking Area Program. She explained that her role in the case was to take data collected by BCI, a division of the Ohio Attorney General's Office, and turn it into “information.” She worked with the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force, another multi-jurisdictional law enforcement group, on this case, she said.
HIDTA is part of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. According to HIDTA's website, HIDTA provides assistance to federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies operating in areas determined to be sensitive drug trafficking areas.
Smith said his mission is to take the cell phone data collected by the BCI and present the results in a “more readable format.”
During cross-examination by Mike Jacobone, the lead prosecutor in the case, Smith said he looked at the cell phone location data of Crump and Bryant. He said cell phones communicate with cell towers even when users are not making calls or sending text messages, and communications can occur without the user's knowledge.
The data includes what could be called a “confidence level” of the results, Smith said. The confidence level is classified as “low” which means that he is within 300 meters from the actual location of the phone. Medium, meaning a range of 100 to 300 meters from the phone's physical location. High means less than 100 meters from your actual location.
Based on these confidence levels, we create a visual on the map that shows low confidence levels as large circles, medium confidence levels as medium circles, and high confidence levels as small circles.
Jacobone showed a video Smith made showing the locations of Crump and Bryant's cellphones before, during and after the shooting. The confidence level of the location was indicated by a small or large circle. The circles showed Crump and Bryant's cell phones traveling between Youngstown and Struthers with varying degrees of confidence before and after the shooting.
But data from the time the shooting allegedly occurred at 1:50 a.m. showed a high degree of confidence that Crump and Bryant's cellphones were located near their home on Perry Street in Struthers, the video said. .
Under cross-examination by Lou DeFabio, Crump's attorney, Smith agreed that his job was to “visualize data.”
DeFabio asked, “Do we really understand the science of where low confidence, medium confidence, and high confidence come from?”
“No,” she answered.
“Do you know if it was tested?”
“Not to my knowledge,” she replied.
BCI computer forensic scientist Joanne Gibb spent much of the morning testifying about obtaining evidence on the phones of various people involved in the case. Some of the phones had clamps on them.
Another witness, Special Agent Heather Karl of the Ohio State Attorney's Office, testified that surveillance video from the Perry Street home that showed someone entering the home where the shooting occurred was not available.
Some of the scientific evidence did not necessarily refer to evidence obtained by witnesses as belonging to a specific suspect, but instead to evidence that individuals use to create various types of online accounts, such as Google accounts. used the same name, which caused confusion.
Having to convert data from Coordinated Universal Time to Eastern Standard Time sometimes led to confusion about when things happened.
In many cases, Gibb has provided conversion to Eastern Standard Time to avoid confusion. For example, she testified about location data showing that the iPhone involved in the incident was located at 96 Perry Street in Struthers at 1:43 a.m. “local time” on September 21, 2020.
Jacobone asked if that was “nine minutes” before Struthers police were called to the shooting at 96 Perry Street.
Gibb said yes. She also agreed that her phone call was made from Perry Street at 1:51 a.m., shortly after police were called to her home. However, it was unclear whose call it was, but it was likely Crump's or Bryant's.
