New sentence imposed in ’05 Bridgeport baseball bat slayings
BRIDGEPORT — A Bridgeport drug dealer who led his brother and a friend in a 2005 triple murder was sentenced to life in prison Thursday, nearly three years after an appeals court ruled that his death sentence in the case should be set aside.
Azibo Aquart was convicted in the killings of three people who were found bound in duct tape and beaten to death with baseball bats in a Charles Street, Bridgeport apartment in Aug. 24, 2005.
The victims were 43year-old Tina Johnson, a home health care aide who dabbled in crack sales and who Aquart considered a threat to his operation, according to testimony during his trial; Johnson’s boyfriend, 40-year-old James Reid, and friend 54-year-old Basil Williams.
Aquart, now 40, and two other accomplices bound the victims limbs and heads in duct tape “so tight it cut into their skin,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elena Lalli Coronado said — except for Johnson’s eyes, which were left “uncovered to watch the atrocity.”
“He crushed their skulls, he shattered their bones, he splattered their blood over walls, and ceilings and floor,” the prosecutor said. “He struck them over and over again.”
Given the chance to speak, Aquart apologized to the victims’ families.
“I just want to apologize to Tina’s, Basil’s and James’ families for all the pain they’ve had to endure over the years since the loss of their loved ones,” he said. “They’ve gone through something truly tragic that no one should have to go through.”
Family members of the victims told the judge they hoped it would be the last time they’d have to attend a court proceeding connected to Aquart, where they are forced to revisit their loved ones’ agony.
“Give us freedom. Lock him up. Throw away the key,” said Erica Whittingham, one of Johnson’s daughters. “This is too much for us. When he beat my mother’s head in, one of her eyeballs came out.”
Earlier, Aquart’s lawyer, Monica Foster, recalled Aquart’s childhood, in which he suffered extensive physical and sexual abuse and both his parents dealt drugs.
Aquart’s earliest childhood memory, Foster said, was of playing at home with his siblings and having his father rush in the door, huddle the children into a closet, hand his 7-year-old brother a handgun and tell him to shoot whoever came in.
“Leave it to Beaver this family was not,” Foster said.
“What happened to Mr. Aquart at age 12 after his mother died is a disgrace to the most advanced and richest country in the world,” she said. “He bounced around from house to house and was never able to catch a break.”
“If this happened to a young white kid from Darien or Greenwich instead of a young black kid from the poorest city in Connecticut, Bridgeport, I have to believe things would have been very different,” his lawyer said.
Since being incarcerated, Aquart has been a model prisoner, graduating from several courses and becoming a mentor to other prisoners.
Judge Janet Bond Arterton said proceedings like Thursday’s re-sentencing are traumatizing to the victims’ families, renewing the “shock and horror” of the crime.
The judge said Thursday’s proceeding also shed light on the “terrifying and arbitrary” nature of the federal death row on which Aquart spent nearly a decade, including a stretch at the end of the Trump Administration during which 12 inmates were executed.
“However, the defendant’s documented quest for education, purpose and self-rehabilitation under these circumstances and in this isolation is a remarkable manifestation of what everyone wishes existed on Aug. 24, 2005,” the judge said. “We would not be here if it did. It did not.”
She sentenced Aquart to life sentences on three of the murder counts and 40 years in three others, with another 50 years on conspiracy and drug dealing charges.
The judge ordered the sentences to be imposed concurrently.
A federal jury found Aquart guilty in the case on May 23, 2011, after a month-long trial. On June 15, 2011, a jury unanimously decided that Aquart should be sentenced to death. Aquart’s case was the first time a federal defendant in Connecticut was sentenced to death since it was reinstated in 1988.
During the trial, the federal jury convicted Aquart in the killings of Johnson and Williams, but was unable to reach a unanimous decision on his role in Reid’s death. Officials said Reid’s death was ultimately attributed to Aquart’s brother, Azikiwe, who is serving a life sentence in prison for his involvement.
A federal appeals court vacated Aquart’s death sentence after finding
prosecutorial misconduct during the death penalty hearing.
Federal prosecutors said in December 2020 they would no longer seek the death penalty in the case.
Federal prosecutors said Aquart was the “founder and leader” of a drug trafficking group that mainly sold crack cocaine out of an apartment building in the 200 block of Charles Street. Prosecutors said Aquart and his associates resorted to threats, assaults and acts of violence in order to maintain control over the group’s drug distribution activities.
In the summer of 2005, prosecutors said, Aquart and his associates were involved in a “drug trafficking dispute” with Johnson, who lived at the same address as the drug operation and sometimes sold smaller quantities of crack cocaine without approval from Aquart.
On the morning of Aug.
24, 2005, prosecutors said, Aquart — aided by his brother, Efrain Johnson and John Taylor — went into Tina Johnson’s apartment and killed the three people inside.
Investigators found Aquart’s fingerprint on a piece of duct tape and Efrain Johnson’s DNA was found on a torn piece of latex glove that was stuck to the duct tape on one of the victim’s wrists, prosecutors said.
Efrain Johnson was sentenced to 50 years in prison. But in 2013, his conviction was overturned and retrial was denied.
John Taylor — who, prosecutors said, helped the government in the prosecution of his three co-defendants — was sentenced to 108 months in prison. Prosecutors said his sincere remorse for his involvement and his extensive testimony provided during trials were factored in to the sentence.