Defense attorney: James Ray III had no choice but to kill his girlfriend in Montclair

Brooke Barnett, the attorney for James Ray III of Montclair, gave a riveting performance Wednesday during closing arguments in his murder trial in Newark.

Point by point, for nearly three and a half hours, she buttressed Ray’s claim that he killed Angela Bledsoe, his girlfriend of nine years and the mother of his six-year-old daughter, in self-defense when she picked up a 9 mm pistol and pointed it at him as he sat cleaning his guns in their family room on October 22, 2018.

Barnett, who starred on the reality TV show “Jersey Strong,” addressed the fact that, after the killing, Ray had five hours to potentially tamper with the crime scene before leaving to pick up their daughter at school. She reminded the jury that Ray openly admitted in a confession note to taking the pistol out of Bledsoe’s hands and placing it in a pool of blood nearby and removing three spent shell casings and placing them in the gun case on the coffee table. And a defense witness testified that such actions are standard training for cops and the military. Ray was a former Marine and NYPD officer.

The fact that Ray, an attorney with an MBA, fled the scene that afternoon, ending up in Cuba where he was arrested by the FBI, is another potentially damning aspect of the case that Barnett sought to counter. Arguing that he intended to come back once he’d figured out a plan for his defense, she pointed out that he’d bought a return ticket on AeroMexico for early December, something his attorneys discovered and state investigators had ignored, she said. He left his car at Newark airport, bringing his keys with him, and gave his brother, Robert Ray, money to cover his defense and even left him his cellphone to assist in the investigation, she said.

As far as motive goes, Barnett said that Bledsoe, who wanted to move to Florida to be with her lover, Bakari Burns, had “more of a motive to pick up a gun than anybody else.”

Because Ray wouldn't give her permission to move with their daughter to Florida, Bledsoe was “desperate, trapped, like a caged animal,” Barnett said. At one point, she told Ray she’d give up child support if he’d allow her to move there with their daughter.

“James was the only thing standing in her way," she said. "She was like a ticking time bomb."

In his own words: James Ray III trial of Angela Bledsoe killing hinges on his writings

Barnett portrayed Bledsoe as a “liar” for cheating on Ray and “strategic” because she was house hunting behind his back and hid the affair from her sister and cousin. Many of her texts, she said, were laying the groundwork for the upcoming custody battle.

“She despised James,” Barnett said, recounting that Bledsoe had told her sister, Lisa LaBoo, that she “wanted to spit in James’ food.”

By contrast, she said, Ray was mild-mannered and reasonable. She read aloud texts where he pleaded for calm and for the two to work things out in their daughter’s best interests. On Ray’s 3,000-plus texts in evidence, she said, he never “cursed at her or threatened to kick her out of his home,” even when she’d “sneakily” did not put in a deposit for their child’s fall schooling or when he found out about her affair. He’d apparently had no issue with her frequent trips, including those that were, unbeknownst to him, trysts with her lover, Barnett said

“She was abused and scared? Where’s the evidence?” Barnett asked.

She assailed the work of the state’s expert witnesses, especially detective Murad Muhammad, the lead investigator on the case. Accusing Muhammad of "willful blindness," she said he never spoke to any of Ray’s contacts, including his grown children or Anita, the woman he called twice the day of the shooting, or sent Bledsoe’s phone for extraction. Muhammad also failed to seek records on how often Ray and Bledsoe went to the shooting range, which would have shown why James “knew when [Bledsoe] pointed the gun at him she had the ability to use it,” she said.

Barnett also blasted Frank Ricci, the prosecutor's crime scene investigator, for never testing the 9 mm pistol near Bledsoe for DNA. “The grooves in the gun are where DNA lives,” she said. Instead he tested it only for fingerprints and found none, she said. “He told us fingerprints are more reliable than DNA,” she said. “That is the furthest thing from the truth. If it had been tested, her DNA would have been on the gun.”

The fact that one of the three bullets to pierce Bledsoe was in her back was another fact Barnett tried to counter to argue he shot in self-defense. Experts agree that Ray’s first shot to Bledsoe was to her chest when she was sitting on the family room couch and, Ray said, she pointed a gun at him. After hiding in the bathroom, he wrote, he emerged to see a trail of blood from the family room to the kitchen, where Bledsoe was sitting up. When she again reached for her gun and pointed it at him, he began firing and “couldn’t stop.”

Three bullets hit her in the kitchen − one to her left cheek, one to her back and one which ricocheted off the floor and grazed her. The prosecution’s theory is that Bledsoe was crawling on her hands and knees when the bullet hit her in the back, but Barnett said the medical examiner testified that the “wound path” indicated that she could have simply been “leaning forward.”

Last week, firearms expert Emanuel Kapelsohn testified that a shot to Bledsoe’s face could have “spun her around,” leading to the shot in the back and her final position face down on the floor.

“What happened to Angela Bledsoe is tragic, unimaginable,” said Barnett. "But James Ray sits before you in a cloak of innocence.

"The state has to prove to you that Angela Bledsoe did not pick up the 9 mm gun at point it at James Ray,” and they have failed to do that, she said. "And we have an individual sitting here who reasonably believes he had no choice but to shoot or be shot.”

The prosecution’s closing arguments will be held Thursday.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Defense attorney: James Ray had no choice but to kill his girlfriend