White Plains man found guilty of murder in parking lot shooting
A White Plains man was convicted of second-degree murder Friday in the fatal shooting two years ago of a fellow resident of the Winbrook housing project.
The jury verdict came two days after the trial's final witness, Ebony Strange, recounted watching her husband Deron Strange get shot in the parking lot of 225 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. late on the night of May 27, 2020. She identified the defendant, Brandon Williams, as the killer – just as she had done moments after the shooting when she called him "short little Brandon" when the first White Plains police officer arrived on the scene.
"Never once did she equivocate. She named him as the shooter within seconds," Assistant District Attorney Marissa Mora-Wynn said in closing arguments Wednesday. "There was no time to fabricate. No time for reflection. She was not mistaken."
Ebony Strange said she knew Williams, who lived in the next building, since before he was born and had seen him that whole evening arguing with her husband, although the reason for the acrimony was never made clear during the trial.
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She said Williams had been on a scooter just before the shooting. When she heard a loud "boom" she looked up to see a puff of smoke and then watched Williams chase her husband around cars and fire four more times before her husband fell to the ground and Williams ran off.
The couple had five sons, ranging in age from six to 19. Some of the boys had gone to the window of their second-floor apartment after hearing the gunfire.
Their mortally wounded father was taken to White Plains Hospital a block away, where he died early the next morning.
Mora-Wynn and Assistant District Attorney Laura Murphy built their case not only on the wife's testimony but also on GPS data that put Williams' cellphone in the vicinity of the shooting.
Less than two days after the shooting, investigators tracked Williams' cellphone to the Hyatt hotel in Harrison, where he was staying with his girlfriend. They took him into custody when he left the hotel.
Williams denied any involvement in the shooting. He initially claimed he was someone else but then acknowledged knowing he had been identified as the shooter. Defense lawyer Angelo MacDonald said in his closing arguments that Williams had not gone to hide there, that the reservation had been made before the shooting.
MacDonald argued there were conflicting accounts of the clothes the shooter was wearing, with Ebony Strange saying he wore yellow pants and a third-floor resident who watched from her window thinking it was a yellow top. Video showed Williams was wearing yellow pants but other video from the neighborhood that night also showed an unidentified man wearing a yellow shirt.
While arguing there was ample reasonable doubt regarding who the actual shooter was, MacDonald also made a case for a manslaughter conviction to spare his client a life sentence. He argued that the nature of the injuries, internal bleeding from a rare perforated iliac artery, suggested that the shooter had not intended to kill.
But Mora-Wynn countered that no one fires five times at someone without trying to kill them.
Williams, 28, faces a minimum of 15 years to life in prison and a maximum of 25 years to life. He was returned to the Westchester County jail to await sentencing, which Judge George Fufidio scheduled for Dec. 5.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: White Plains shooting: Man convicted in parking lot murder
