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Miles Cooke, left, and Justin Cooke, right.
(Harrisburg police)
A comment Ronald McGruder Jr. made two days before he was gunned down on a Harrisburg street might have been the catalyst that got him killed, a city woman told a Dauphin County jury Monday.
The 35-year-old McGruder uttered that statement during a gathering at her home in the city's Uptown district in late May 2014, Courtney Williams said.
One of two Harrisburg brothers charged with McGruder's slaying, Justin Cooke, was there, too, she said. Williams said she heard McGruder loudly tell Cooke he knew that Cooke's brother Miles was involved in a 2013 murder of one of McGruder's friends.
McGruder told Justin Cooke that he wouldn't shut up about that unless he was shot in the head, Williams said.
Early on May 30, 2014, someone shot McGruder twice in the head at Cameron and Hanover streets.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Johnny Baer told the jury the killers were Justin and Miles Cooke. And the case against the brothers "is all about timing," he said as the homicide trial for the siblings got underway.
In his opening statement, Baer said footage from surveillance cameras all over Harrisburg pins the brothers to the killing. That footage shows them leaving the Double D's bar with McGruder minutes before he was killed, then a camera mounted on a church shows their car in the vicinity after the slaying occurred, the prosecutor said.
A witness saw two men stand over a screaming McGruder and shoot him at 1:58 a.m., Baer said. And, he added, a cell phone call Miles made minutes after the murder places the brothers near the murder scene.
"That timeline will virtually eliminate the probability that anyone else killed Ronald McGruder," Baer said. "To me, this is clear as day a first-degree murder case."
First-degree murder convictions would send the brothers to prison for life.
Yet Public Defender Petra Gross, one of the lawyers for 30-year-old Justin Cooke, insisted Baer's case has a lot of "holes."
"Just like a good murder mystery, there might be a few surprises along the way," she said. "What the evidence will show is that (the Cookes) were not involved."
Sean Quinlan, the attorney for 31-year-old Miles Cooke, stressed what he said is lacking in the prosecution's case.
"You're never going hear a witness who makes a positive identification of the shooters," Quinlan said. Nor, he said, can investigators provide blood, DNA or gunshot residue evidence that would tie the brothers to McGruder's murder.
"There wasn't a drop of blood on these guys," Quinlan said. He noted as well that a witness to the shooting initially described the killers as skinny black men. Both of the Cookes are husky.
Williams was the first witness Baer called. She said McGruder was "like family" and was living with her and her seven children before he was killed.
Williams said that when he confronted Justin Cooke, McGruder was talking about the murder of his friend, 26-year-old Warren Beasley, who was shot to death in his car in the city on Halloween night in 2013. Neither of the Cookes was charged with that killing.
Under questioning by Public Defender Jonathan White, Justin Cooke's other lawyer, Williams said she was smoking marijuana when she supposedly heard the conversation between McGruder and Justin Cooke. She said she heard only part of their exchange.
The lead investigator of the murder, Detective Richard Iachini, used to be her probation officer, she said.
Williams insisted under cross-examination by Quinlan that she was not smoking "dippers," marijuana cigarettes doused with embalming fluid, when she claims to have heard McGruder and Justin Cooke talking.
She said she hasn't used drugs in more than a year. "Right at the moment I'm a recovering addict," Williams said.