Wilkinsburg slaying trial begins
Witnesses, including wounded woman and responding officer, describe deadly 2016 shooting that killed 5, unborn child
Tonjia Cunningham had just taken a family picture for her friend Tina Shelton.
Ms. Shelton’s family had gathered for a barbecue on an unusually warm winter evening on March 9, 2016, and they wanted to take a group photo. They stood on the steps of the back porch of 1304 Franklin Ave. in Wilkinsburg.
Ms. Cunningham, who worked with Ms. Shelton, had gone with her best friend to the picnic and arrived about 10:30 p.m. After being introduced to several family members, Ms. Cunningham offered to take the picture.
Just after she returned the cellphone she used, Ms. Cunningham said she saw a man standing outside the backyard fence with a long gun.
When she asked the others if they saw him and then looked back, he was gone.
But moments later, Ms. Cunningham said, she heard two guns.
“Pop, pop. Boom, boom. Pop, pop, pop. Boom, boom.” Everyone ran toward the porch. “I put one foot on the step, felt a push in my back, and the next thing I know, I was in the fetal position on the porch,” Ms. Cunningham testified Monday. “I just remember being in the corner, telling myself, ‘You’re going to get shot. It’s going to hurt. But you’ll be OK.’”
As she lay there, pieces of glass and house rained down on her. “It seemed like an eternity.” Ms. Cunningham was one of 10 witnesses called Monday by the prosecution in the opening day of trial for Cheron Shelton, 33, of Lincoln-Lemington. He is charged with killing five people and an unborn child that night.
If Shelton is convicted of first-degree murder, the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.
A co-defendant, Robert Thomas, was dismissed from the case just an hour before trial began Monday morning, after Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski agreed with defense
attorney Casey White that there was not enough evidence against his client to hold him for trial.
Ms. Cunningham, who spent about 30 minutes on the stand, described the harrowing ordeal she endured after the shooting finally stopped.
She wondered if she should stay where she was and pretend to be dead.
But she didn’t. Instead, Ms. Cunningham went into the kitchen and found Lamont Powell, who police believe was the intended target of the shooting. Powell, who was wounded, was crawling toward the living room. She asked if there was a landline phone in the house, but he said there wasn’t. He didn’t have a cellphone, and hers was in her car.
“He told me I had to go get it,” she recalled, crying on the stand. “I told him I couldn’t. I told him I was afraid because I didn’t know if they were still out there.”
But, Ms. Cunningham continued, she was the only one who could call for help. “So I did.”
The 45-year-old licensed practical nurse called 911, and then spoke to the first officers who arrived.
Then she returned into the house and found several of the children inside who had been at the party.
“I started taking the kids next door,” she said.
Ms. Cunningham told one of them to be a big girl and stay inside the neighbor’s house until someone she knew came to get her.
Then, she continued, she told Powell, who had been shot in the chest, to keep talking to himself to stay strong. Then she went to find Ms. Shelton, who was on the back porch.
“I told them that Tina was still alive,” she said. “She was breathing.”
Ms. Cunningham thought to herself at the time, “‘She’s strong. She can do this. She was shot in the chest, but she can do this.’
“She was my friend, and I wanted her to live.”
During her testimony, prosecutors played Ms. Cunningham’s 911 call, but much of it was inaudible, as the phone line between her and the call taker remained open for 6½ minutes.
About five minutes in, Ms. Cunningham can be heard, repeating her friend’s name: “Tina. Tina. Tina, talk to me. Tina. Tina.Tina. Tina. Tina. Tina. Talk to me. Hold on. Hold on. Don’t you ... die on me. “Oh, God. Tina.”
It was only later, once police told Ms. Cunningham to go back inside the house, that she realized she, too, had been shot just above her ankle.
Hers was the most emotional testimony of the day.
Prosecutors called six officers and paramedics who were the first responders, who described the scene as chaotic.
They also called the man who initially was able to link Shelton to the scene that night: Wilkinsburg Detective Michael Adams.
Detective Adams was on patrol in the area, he told the jury, when he heard what he thought was a volley of shots — like a crackling noise. Then, he said, it became more rhythmic, “Boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom. Boom, boom.”
He said it sounded like when he and fellow officers go to the firing range.
As Detective Adams made his way toward the sound in his patrol car — maybe a football field away — he saw a man walk to a white Lincoln parked on Franklin Avenue, open the driver’s door, get in and sit down.
The 25-year veteran officer said he pulled side-byside to the car, with their driver’s side windows facing each other, and waited for the man to look at him, so he could direct him to lower his window so he could ask if he’d heard the shots or seen anything.
“The gentleman never turned his head,” he said.
Detective Adams waited, he testified on direct examination, for five or six seconds, before continuing on as he heard a woman screaming for help.
As he drove away, though, the detective said he looked in his mirror and made note of the Lincoln’s license plate number. “Jiffy Butter Peanut 2200,” he recounted. He made a mental note of it and went to the scene.
When he arrived, Detective Adams said, it was mayhem. It wasn’t until some time later, while standing in the backyard, that he mentioned to a county homicide detective that he had a license plate number.
“‘I don’t know if it’s worth anything,’” he said he told him. And then he passed it along. At the time, Detective Adams testified, he didn’t know if the person in the Lincoln was a suspect, a witness or uninvolved.
But later, police tracked the license plate to the car owned by Shelton’s mother and sister, and Detective Adams identified Shelton as the man he saw.
Defense attorney Randall McKinney told the jury in his opening he believed Detective Adams was lying. During cross-examination, he attempted to point out inconsistencies in his testimony from the preliminary hearing in July 2016 to now.
At the preliminary hearing, Detective Adams said he was stopped next to the Lincoln for as long as 60 seconds, although on Monday, he said it was maybe only five seconds.
Mr. McKinney also asked why the detective didn’t attempt to question the man or detain him. Detective Adams explained later that at the time he saw the man, it was unclear there had even been a shooting, and he had not been given any detailed information about a suspect or any description.
“We had nothing at that moment except a gentleman getting in a car,” the detective said.