After two years, the trial of the men prosecutors say shot and killed party planner Rian Thal and her friend Timothy Gilmore, an Ohio truck driver, in a botched robbery got under way Monday before a jury of seven women and five men.
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Selber told the jury in her opening statement that the evidence against the three men - security video of the shootings, cellphone records, and testimony of at least three witnesses who pleaded guilty - is "overwhelming."
"Confronted by this mountain of evidence," Selber said, the defense "will try to distract you from it."
On trial on felony murder charges are Will Hook, 43, also known as Keith Epps, the alleged mastermind of the June 27, 2009, robberies-turned-killings in the new complex at 10th and Hancock Streets.
Seated with him are two alleged gunmen prosecutors say Hook hired to rob Thal and Gilmore of what he believed was a large cache of drugs and cash: Antonio Wright, 30, and Edward Daniels, 44.
Testimony resumes Tuesday after prosecutors spent Monday afternoon presenting a series of police witnesses who described the scene outside Thal's posh seventh-floor apartment in the Navona building shortly after the 5:17 p.m. slayings.
Thal, 34, was shot at point-blank range in the head, lying on her back outside her apartment's open door.
Gilmore tried to flee and made it 172 feet down the hallway from Thal's apartment to the elevators before being shot and falling facedown.
Inside Thal's apartment, police found what the gunmen left behind: more than $100,000 in cash and 81/2 pounds of cocaine.
Much of Monday's court session was taken up by opening statements from the prosecutor and three defense lawyers.
"The word of their witnesses is not worth the debris on the bottom of my shoe," Hook's attorney, Christopher D. Warren, told the jury.
