NYC man charged with fatal shooting in Kingston
A New York City man has been charged with murder in the February shooting death of Ashley Stephan Dixon, city police and the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
The arrest of Cory Q. Smith, 35, of St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx, was the first to result from any of the three recent homicides in Kingston, which authorities have said were unrelated.
A second-degree murder indictment was handed up March 6 by an Ulster County grand jury, District Attorney David Clegg said at the time, but Smith’s name was not made public until Friday.
Kingston police said Friday that Smith has been in federal custody for a probation violation since Feb. 12, the day after Dixon was killed.
Smith was arraigned Friday by Ulster County Family Court Judge Anthony McGinty, sitting as acting County Court judge. It was not immediately clear where Smith was sent afterward, though it was not the Ulster County Jail, an officer there said. Smith had been in the Rensselaer County Jail since being taken into custody last month.
Dixon, 31, was shot three times at close range outside building 34-48 at the Stuyvesant Charter apartment complex on Sheehan Court in Kingston about 7:30 p.m. Feb. 11, authorities said previously. He died a short time later at HealthAlliance Hospital’s Broadway Campus.
Police said Friday that Smith and Dixon were having a verbal dispute outside the apartment building before the shooting.
Smith fled the area immediately afterward and was taken
into custody for the federal probation violation in New York City, police said.
Smith was arrested in 2006 for cocaine sales and weapon possession, police said. At that time, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and five years of post-release supervision.
The Dixon homicide was the third in Kingston, all by gunfire, in a span of less than four months. No arrests have been announced in the other two.
Daniel Thomas, 27, was killed Oct. 24, 2019, near the intersection of Cedar and Prospect streets in Midtown. Myron T. Moye, 36, was slain Nov. 1, 2019, in a house at West O’Reilly Street, also in Midtown.
“The members of the Kingston Police Department continue to relentlessly work on the other two open homicides,” the department said in a Facebook post on Friday.
Three homicides in Kingston in a span of less than four months appears to be without precedent. In fact, it’s been rare in recent decades for Kingston to have more than one homicide per year, and the city sometimes has gone several years in a row without a killing.
Kingston police also still are working to solve a nonfatal shooting that occurred on Franklin Street in Midtown on Dec. 29, 2019, and shots being fired at a house on East St. James Street on Feb. 14.
Of Smith’s arrest, Clegg said in a prepared statement Friday: “This investigation could not have reached the point of indictment without the extraordinary efforts of the Kingston Police, the New York State Police BCI (Bureau of Criminal Investigation) and Major Crimes Unit, the town of Ulster police, the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office, and a team of Ulster County District Attorney investigators, along with the cooperation of members of the community.”