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North Jersey
April 30, 2014
Two very different stories emerged during closing arguments in the trial of a man accused of a 2009 Verona murder.
Tariq Kyam, formerly known as Raymond Perry, is accused of shooting Daniel Pritchard while robbing a Claridge Sunoco on Pompton Avenue. On Tuesday, April 22, lawyers defending Kyam said a main witness for the prosecution is a liar and accused him of the five-year-old murder. Refuting them, prosecutors told the jury that their witness was reliable and was one of a cluster of connections linking Kyam to the shooting death.
Kyam has pleaded not guilty to seven counts including murder, robbery and weapons charges.
Presenting the defense’s argument to the jury, co-attorney Jerome Kearns said David Fate – who testified against Kyam April 3 – was a liar. He referred to Fate as the prosecution’s only direct evidence linking Kyam to the murder.
“He’s been caught in those lies. We know he can’t be trusted and we know that Tariq Kyam had nothing to do with those incidents,” Kearns said.
Among Fate’s inconsistencies in testimony, according to Kearns:
• Fate changed who he was with when he recalled stealing a car used in the Sunoco robbery.
• Fate also changed his recollections of a black bag used in the robbery and where the pair went following the Verona murder.
• Kearns contested Fate’s version of what happened in a seven-minute window between a purchase at a Cedar Grove Burger King on Pompton Avenue and a 911 call made after a silent alarm was activated at the Claridge Sunoco on Bloomfield Avenue. In Fate’s testimony, the pair drove to the Sunoco and Kyam spoke to Pritchard in the station before retrieving a gun from their car. Fate stayed in the passenger side of the car and watched what happened inside the store, including Pritchard hitting the panic button. But Kearns said the events as Fate described would take much longer than the seven minutes.
In Kearns’s version of events, Fate drove to the gas station where Pritchard was sitting in a waiting room watching television. He shot the victim at that spot and ordered him to move behind the register, where Pritchard triggered the silent alarm. There, Kearns told the jury, Fate shot him again. Kearns said that version was more probable than seeing Pritchard hit the button from inside the car.
“He sees it because he’s in there murdering and robbing Daniel Pritchard,” Kearns said.
Fate then sold Kyam a stolen cellphone in exchange for a ticket to South Carolina to “get out of dodge,” Kearns said.
Fate pleaded guilty to some of the robbery counts for a jail sentence that could range from 10 to 28 years. Kearns told the jury they should consider the hundreds of years of prison time Fate faced for the crimes he was accused of before he made a deal with prosecutors.
“David Fate’s stories don’t add up,” he said. “They don’t add up because his prison sentence added up.”
After a break following Kearns’ nearly 40-minute argument, Assistant Prosecutor Erica Liu began a point-by-point look at the dots connecting Kyam to the murder.
“[Kyam] is the leader in this case,” she told the jury. “He is the shooter, he is the murderer.”
She referred to her version of the story as more probable and more logical and disagreed with the defense attorney’s picture of Fate, whom she insisted told the truth in front of the jury. She didn’t dispute that Fate was a criminal, but said he had a tenth-grade education, was easily confused and didn’t understand many of the questions being asked of him. And, 19 years younger than his older cousin, Fate was influenced by Kyam. Further, she said, Fate’s testimony highly correlated with those of two employees of a Bloomfield Avenue travel agency, where the pair visited shortly before the murder.
Based on their testimony, Fate and Kyam were together 20 minutes before evidence places Fate at the Burger King.
“They circumstantially prove the defendant’s guilt,” Liu said.
As for Fate’s other inconsistencies, she said the defense was “nitpicking” and didn’t truly weigh in on the defendant’s larger guilt.
Liu said that Pritchard’s cellphone and the gun used in the gas station robbery was found in the home where he was arrested after the murder. And she said that witnesses and other evidence connects Kyam to owning the gun.
As she cycled through her argument, she gradually hung 23 circles representing evidence on a poster board and drew red lines connecting them to Kyam’s name. Liu said it wasn’t a question of “if” Kyam was guilty of the murder.
“The question you should ask yourself is: How is it not this defendant?” she said.
Jury deliberations are scheduled to begin Thursday morning.
