For many present in Judge Thomas Motley’s courtroom late Wednesday morning, the eight minutes played from a recorded 911 call likely felt interminable.
“That’s not a good address… What’s your location?” the 911 dispatcher asks the caller, in different ways, again and again.
The caller tells her, again and again. Clay Terrace. 54th Street. The number 300 is on the street sign. The house number is 5339. Near the H.D. Woodson construction. Please just come, he says. There’s going to be a fight.
There were police at the top of the hill, he said, but added that he didn’t want to be seen talking to them. His voice was quiet, he said, because he was in the crowd.
There’s two guys, he tells the dispatcher. One has a gun. One has a knife.
“You need to tell me where you are,” the dispatcher says again.
And then, five minutes into the phone call, while the caller looks for yet another address to give the dispatcher, gunshots. Bang bang bang bang.
“Do you hear that?” the caller asks.
“Yeah, I heard it,” the dispatcher says.
The call played for the jury Wednesday while the caller was on the witness stand.
“All I wanted to do was prevent the incident from happening,” he later said. “I was just trying to prevent the whole scenario, Angelo getting killed and someone going to jail and all.”
The government’s case against Rickey Pharr, accused in the shooting death of Angelo Jones, stretched into a second day of testimony Wednesday, with at least three more witnesses expected to be called Thursday.
Four witnesses took the stand Wednesday: a friend of Pharr’s, the 911 caller, an eyewitness to the crowd gathered in the Clay Terrace parking lot before the shooting, and a neighbor of Pharr’s who said she overheard him talking about “slumping,” or killing, a man that night.
Three of those witnesses said they were afraid to testify in the case. According to the government’s evidence, Jones was cooperating in some way in an MPD investigation and he may have been killed for that.
One witness lost her composure on the stand and struggled to answer questions about Pharr.
Said another witness, “[Snitching] is a bad thing.”
Asked if he was concerned about being called a “snitch,” he said, “yes.”
Testimony is expected to resume at 10 a.m. Thursday.
Note: An error has been corrected in this story. The original post stated that one of the addresses given in the 911 call was 3559. In fact it was 5339.
