Cameras aid police in probing North Side homicide
Artificial eyes track alleged gunman
With a man dead and a woman wounded, Pittsburgh police turned to a network of silent witnesses to help crack the case: Surveillance cameras.
As they worked to unravel the Dec. 18 midday slaying on the North Side of a Duquesne man, detectives tracked the suspected killer’s movements just after the shooting by using at least seven different public and private cameras — on streets, in an apartment building, at a store.
By exploiting the robust network of artificial eyes keeping watch over the Perry South neighborhood, police were able to follow along as the suspect went by a house, walked into an apartment tower, boarded an elevator, entered one of the units and then got into a car. Each stop led police to different pieces of evidence.
By Sunday, detectives had what they needed for an arrest warrant. And on Thursday, they arrested Maurice Demond King at his mother’s house in Pitcairn, charging him with gunning down Cedric L. Mack, a father of five, and wounding a jitney driver.
Mr. King, 26, and Mack, 41, were in phone contact that day. They were meeting in Perry South, according to a criminal complaint, but detectives remain stumped as to why. They both arranged for jitney drivers to take them to a rendezvous that quickly turned bloody.
Mack’s driver told police that she was taking Mack to the North Side to meet “Ress” (pronounced “Reese”), and the two men were on the phone just before the shooting at Norwood and Kennedy avenues, the complaint said. Mack told his driver that she was taking him to “his boy,” and so, she told police, she assumed they were friends.
“Oh, there he is,” Mack said, spotting Mr. King. It was just before 3 p.m.
The jitney driver was on the
to say she would be late. Mack was “bickering” with Mr. King, according to the complaint, “stating to ‘Reese’ that he had been trying to meet up with him for two weeks and that he was taking too long today and was upset because Witness 1 was going to be late to pick up his/her kids.”
Mack stepped out of the SUV. As soon as he did, the driver told police, Mr. King opened fire.
The driver’s ears rang from the sound of gunfire. “Get down,” Mack said, pulling her. Mr. King shot Mack over and over before running away, the driver told police. She was struck in the wrist. Mack was dead.
An obituary said he had gone to the All-State Career School for heating, ventilation and air conditioning training and was survived by his children, mother, stepfather and two brothers.
As police assembled at the crime scene, they caught their first break thanks to the weather: There was snow on the ground.
Investigators were told that the shooter might have run south on Norwood. A few blocks away, they found footprints in the snow going to the 200 block of Mayfield Avenue nearby. Video surveillance from the area captured a man wearing black clothing “soon after” the shooting.
Now police had a nickname, an image and a clothing description.
Police continued to follow the footprints, this time to the Steelworkers Tower Apartments, an apartment building doe seniors in the 2600 block of Perrysville Avenue. Looking at building video, police saw a man holding dark clothing and a bag enter just after 3 p.m. using a key fob.
Other video from the area led investigators to conclude that Mr. King had changed his clothes. As police tracked his movements through building cameras, they watched the man go up in the elevator to the second floor. At one point he was holding the clothing and bag, but after he briefly disappeared from camera view, he was empty-handed.
Police learned that next to the elevator is a garbage chute leading to a secured dumpster. Rummaging around in the dumpster, police said they found a bag that matched the one in the video. Inside were black jeans and black shoes, police said; a black hoodie was inside the dumpster.
A sign-in sheet in the building showed that someone named “Reese” had entered on the morning of the shooting to go to an apartment on the second floor. The tenant, police said, was Mr. King’s grandmother. Inside her apartment, police said they found Mr. King’s state ID card and an empty 19-round magazine.
Additional video showed Mr. King leave the high-rise and get into a black Chrysler. City cameras tracked the vehicle through the North Side, to Perry Market on Perrysville Avenue, where store video showed the suspect tossing something into a dumpster behind the store before returning to retrieve it, the complaint said.
One of the North Side cameras equipped with a license plate reader led police to the driver of the Chrysler — a jitney in Glassport. The driver, identified as Witness 3, told detectives that a person who went by “Riss Harrison” used a Facebook jitney page to ask for a ride Dec. 18 at 3:24 p.m.
The driver picked Mr. King up at the apartment building on Perrysville Avenue, police said, and drove him to Pitcairn.