23-year-old Cassidy, hopes that a judge will acquit him of first-degree murder or find him guilty of a lesser charge for the April shootout that left one man dead and two others injured, the Philadelphia Dail News reports.
Desmond Hawkins, 22, of the city's Cedarbrook section, was fatally shot in the back as he sat in a van parked in an alley behind Cassidy's Cedarbrook home. Hawkins and his friends drove to Cassidy's home to settle a fight that had broken out at a Rite-Aid earlier in the day. The fight was between Hawkins' friend, Roberto Johnson, and one of Cassidy's friends.
When the van entered the alleyway, gunfire erupted. Witnesses yesterday differed in their accounts of who fired first, but ballistics evidence found that about 30 shots had been fired at the van and at least 12 shots had been fired from inside the van.
Johnson, who testified yesterday, said he had been outside the van urinating in someone's back yard when the shots rang out.
"As I'm urinating, they drive past," he said of his friends. "I get myself together, shake myself off... and I started hearing the gunshots. When I heard the gunshots, I ducked behind a car."
He said the shots had come from the area close to Cassidy's home.
"The shots carried on," he said. "It seemed as though it was forever. I can't give an exact time frame, but it seemed like a long time."
During cross-examination, John-son admitted to defense attorney Fortunato "Fred" Perri that he really had gone to Cassidy's house that night to settle the score after being beaten up at the drugstore, not to make nice.
"You would shoot somebody if you had to, right?" Perri asked.
"If my life was threatened, and only if my life was threatened," Johnson said.
Johnson testified earlier that, while being beaten up outside the Rite-Aid, one of Cassidy's friends threatened to "bang," or shoot him.
But, Johnson said, he came to the meeting that night without a weapon. He said he had seen only one gun in his friends' van. He picked it up after the shooting, put it in his own car and eventually sold it, he said.
Perri implied during questioning that the first shot may have come from Johnson, who, along with Cassidy's group, was outside the van.
Prosecutor Deborah Watson-Stokes maintained that Cassidy had masterminded the ambush that placed four of his guys in attack positions around the alley. She has said the setup proved premeditated murder.
One of her witnesses, Joseph Newkirk, first told cops that he had seen Cassidy fire a gun that night, but on the witness stand yesterday, he said he had lied to the cops.
"They intimidated me," said Newkirk, a hulking 18-year-old who muttered his testimony in a sleepy, monotone manner.
After Cassidy's preliminary hearing in the case in August, a judge held him only on third-degree murder charges. The district attorney's office appealed that decision to a higher court, and the judge there reinstated the first-degree murder charge.
Trial testimony is expected to end today.
Source:Philadelphia News & HipHop Game..
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