There was a moment in court Wednesday when it almost seemed liked Sheena Robinson-Crews, the widow of a Trenton gang member, was on trial. Her testimony was marked by startling admissions and terse denials.
Yes, Robinson-Crews said, she refused to cooperate with the authorities, even misled them, for several hours after her husband, Tracy Crews, was shot in the neck Sept. 12, 2008 inside their Whittaker Avenue residence.
But, no, Robinson-Crews said, she didn’t orchestrate her husband’s murder, despite suspicions from some of Crews’ family members that she was somehow involved and an implication from the defense that she tampered with a police investigation by deleting messages off one of her husband’s phones. Read more
A city man has been indicted in connection with a 2013 shooting that left a man dead outside of a Chambersburg landmark.
Brandon Nance, 26, was gunned down outside of Italian People’s Bakery on Butler Street around 12:20 p.m. on Aug. 29, 2013.
Dante Alexander
Prosecutors say 20-year-old Dante Alexander and a yet-to-be-apprehended second suspect shot Nance several times before he collapsed in front of the bakery, and then pumped more bullets into him as he laid on the ground.
Prosecutors say police found sixteen 40-caliber shell casings along Butler Street, and the shooting was captured on surveillance video. Read more
Sheena Robinson-Crews was eight months pregnant and pressed with a perilous decision on Sept. 12, 2008.
Her husband, Tracy Crews, had just been shot in the neck inside the couple’s Whittaker Avenue home shortly after he had tucked their 2-year-old daughter into bed.
Crews lay dying in his wife’s arms on a city street near a package liquor store while an ambulance screamed to the scene to take him to Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton. Read more
In the end, James Storey’s lengthy testimony Monday in the Tracy Crews murder trial could have been boiled down to a single nugget for the jury.
Shell casings found inside Crews’ city residence in September 2008 were ballistically matched to a 9 mm luger that was found stashed on a nearby garage. Storey, a former state police lieutenant and the detective who conducted ballistics tests on the shell casings in 2009, talked extensively about striation patterns and used a lot of other fancy terminology before supplying his succinct expert opinion.
The two spent shell casings found inside Crews’ home were “in fact, discharged from within the firearm” that was found near the murder scene. At times, Storey’s testimony was tedious, laborious and hard to follow. It was also interrupted when fire alarms sounded inside the county courthouse, prompting a short evacuation. Read more
Moments before Tracy Crews was shot in the kitchen of his Whittaker Avenue home in September 2008, he put up his hands to try to shield himself, a medical examiner testified Thursday.
But Crews’ hands were no match for a 9 mm bullet. Crews was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead at 12:25 a.m. on Sept. 13, 2008, less than an hour after he was shot after tucking his then-2-year-old daughter into bed.
Tracy Crews, right, with family members. Submitted photo
The fatal shot pierced Crews’ right wrist, grazing the chest area near his clavicle, before it re-entered the left side of his neck and exited from near his ear, said Dr. Daksha Shah, the Mercer County medical examiner who performed Crews’ autopsy.
She was one of three witnesses who took the stand Thursday, the jury’s first day back after myriad delays in trial testimony caused by evidence issues.
Shah testified the bullet “exploded” Crews’ carotid artery, a major vessel that supplies blood to the brain. A V-neck T-shirt Crews had on at the time he was mortally wounded was soaked in blood.
Read more
The prosecutor, Al Garcia, said it best when he surmised Wednesday that attorneys involved in the Tracy Crews murder trial are in “uncharted territory.”
Garcia is in the peculiar position of working with the defense to possibly help clear its clients, William Brown and Nigel Joseph Dawson.
The thought of a prosecutor taking such measures is jaw-dropping. But that’s the position Garcia is in because of discovery issues that threaten to derail the murder trial. Read more
It was spring 2013 and Gary Britton, the Trenton Police lead detective in the Tracy Crews murder case, had gotten a tip from a Pennsylvania prison official that a female inmate at Muncy claimed she had information implicating Crews’ widow, Sheena Robinson-Crews, in his murder. Read more
Ongoing publicity of the Tracy Crews murder trial led a judge Wednesday to issue a gag order preventing attorneys from speaking with the media about the case.
While issuing his decision, the judge, Andrew Smithson, also accused The Trentonian of “throwing me under the bus for holding a star chamber proceeding” – a reference to a secretive judicial hearing. Read more
The murder trial of two men suspected of killing Tracy Crews in 2008 has had myriad twists and turns.
None was bigger than the bombshell leveled this week, implicating Sheena Robinson-Crews, the victim’s widow, as a possible co-conspirator in his murder. Read more
Police investigate Trenton’s first homicide of 2015 in the 200 block of Pearl Street. Scott Ketterer - The Trentonian
The family of Tuesday’s murder victim believes they know the identity of the killer, who they say made death threats for the past several months.
Anthony Jones, 43, was gunned down Tuesday evening in the 200 block of Pearl Street. Police found his body lying in the middle of the street around 6:40 p.m., and Jones was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Jones and his family used to live on Pearl Street, but in December they moved to a house on General Greene Avenue. The family moved because they were tired of the shootings and open-air drug deals that plague their old neighborhood.
“We wanted to get out of the area,” Jones’s fiancee Berta Gist-Jones said. “We made a move for our children.” Read more
