“9-1-1 it’s an emergency, please send a SWAT team with urgency,” Larnell Allen rapped from the witness stand at Kwan Kearney‘s trial Tuesday.
The words, a rough approximation of Gucci Mane’s popular song “911 Emergency,” had been sung by Allen before. Together on Nov. 8, 2010, he, Kearney and others sang them out, laughing, as they heard sirens responding to the Trinidad street where Joseph Alonzo Sharps Jr. and De’Onte Bilbro had just been shot. A shooting that Allen said he and Kearney both took part in.
“As soon as [Kearney] pulls the gun he fires,” Allen said of the run-in between Sharps, Bilbro, Kearney, a 14-year-old, and himself. “I withdrew my gun from my hip and I fired. It’s like backing him up. One fires, we all fire.”
That shooting killed 17-year-old Sharps and seriously wounded then-18-year-old Bilbro. Families of the two young men were in court Tuesday, both in the audience and on the witness stand. Bilbro, too, took the witness stand, describing for jurors how he and his best friend were walking home from a nearby gas station, when three guys walked towards them on the sidewalk.
“I looked to see who I was walking past and the tallest one said ‘Whatchya reaching for?’” Bilbro remembered. “Joe said, ‘We ain’t reaching for nothing.”
That’s when the shots rang out, Bilbro said, he fell to the ground injured. His left leg lay up against his stomach; he later learned that his femur had been shattered. Still, he got up and ran across the street thinking that he could go get help. But once across the street, his leg crumpled under him and he fell, again.
He called his mom on his cell phone.
“Mom,” Dorothea Bilbro told the jury her son said when she picked up the phone. “I’ve been shot. Around the corner.”
She jumped in her car and drove around the corner. “I saw Joe and I saw De’Onte,” she remembered. She checked on her son, then ran to his best friend.
“This is Ma Bilbro,” she said she told Sharps. “You’re going to be alright.”
Earlier, Prosecutor David Saybolt had asked De’Onte Bilbro: Who was the “tall guy” that shot at him and his best friend?
Bilbro stood up from the witness stand and pointed at Kearney, dressed in a light pink button-down shirt and a striped tie.
The trial is expected to resume Wednesday morning at 10 a.m.
