The two large monitors in the courtroom showed the split-screen view from Christina Spicuzza’s dashboard camera.
On the left, Spicuzza, wearing glasses and a surgical mask, can be seen driving her car the evening of Feb. 10, 2022, talking to her Uber passengers with kindness.
“It was nice meeting you,” she told one woman as she exited the back seat.
On the other view, jurors watched the path Spicuzza traveled that night after picking up Calvin Crew at his house in Pitcairn at 9:14 p.m.
Crew, wearing a dark face covering, hat and hood, said little as they drove for nearly 20 minutes.
But as they neared his destination on Dersam Street in Penn Hills, Crew shifted into the middle of the back seat. Moments after Spicuzza asked him what side of the street he needed, she felt a gun to the back of her head.
“Keep driving,” he told her.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she responded. “Come on, man. I got a family.”
Crew responded, “I got a family, too.”
Spicuzza, who repeatedly reached back and touched the gun pressed against her, continued, “What are you doing? Please, stop.
“Why are you doing this?
“Why are you doing this?
“Why are you doing this?”
Crew didn’t answer, other than to instruct her to keep driving.
“Please. Please, stop,” Spicuzza said. “Please. I’m begging you. I’ve got four kids. What are you doing? Get that off of me. Please.”
“Keep driving,” Crew said, before shifting the gun to his left hand and reaching into the front seat with his right.
He took her phone from its stand, and said to her, “Do what I say, and everything will be OK.”
Then he ripped the dashboard camera from its mount, and the screen went dark.
Four-minute gap
The chilling video, which ran about 27 minutes, was played Thursday, the fourth day of Crew’s trial in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court on charges of criminal homicide, robbery, kidnapping tampering with evidence and carrying a firearm without a license.
Late in the afternoon, the prosecution rested. The defense called its first witness and will resume its case Friday.
Police said Crew, 24, directed Spicuzza to drive to Rosecrest Drive in Monroeville, where he ordered her out of the car and marched her through the woods.
Her body was found there two days later by a passing Amazon delivery driver. She had been shot once in the back of the head.
A civilian recovered Spicuzza’s cellphone underneath the Westinghouse Bridge, and detectives searching along Dersam Street on Feb. 17, 2022, recovered the dashcam on the side of the road leaning against a chain-link fence.
Matthew Rosenberg, a digital forensic analyst with the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office, told the jury on Thursday he was able to download the camera’s contents from that night.
The footage started inside Spicuzza’s garage just after 7 p.m. as the man she considered to be her husband, Brandon Marto, cleaned the windows and wiped the car down for her.
About two hours later, Spicuzza was requested to pick up Crew at his apartment in Pitcairn around 9:08 p.m. Cellphone records showed that for five minutes, as she waited for Crew to enter the Nissan Sentra she had rented to drive for Uber, she accessed a Bible app on her phone.
Crew admitted in a police interview that he took the Uber. But he told detectives he got out in Penn Hills, walked to Wilkinsburg and caught a bus home. Detectives said they reviewed video footage and found no evidence to back up Crew’s story.
Rosenberg went chronologically through Spicuzza’s cellphone records that evening. He told the jury that someone accessed the Dollar Bank app at 9:38 p.m. and Venmo at 9:39 p.m.
The phone, which had been connected to the car via Bluetooth, disconnected at 10:20 p.m., Rosenberg said.
It reconnected four minutes later.
It is during those four minutes, prosecutors said, that Crew took Spicuzza into the woods and killed her.
At 10:27 p.m., Rosenberg testified, the phone was placed in airplane mode. And at 10:39 p.m., it disconnected from Bluetooth again.
That’s when, investigators believe, Crew threw it over the bridge.
Missing gun
Later on Thursday, Allegheny County Police homicide Det. William Hermann said he was dispatched to the apartment Crew shared with his girlfriend, Tanaya Mullen, on Feb. 17, 2022, to try to find her Springfield Armory 9 mm handgun that she’d purchased in July 2021.
Hermann told the jury he found an empty box from the purchase, including a sales receipt, but the gun was missing.
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Raymond Everett, the lab manager for the firearms section at the crime lab, testified that he examined the single shell casing found near Spicuzza’s body.
The markings on it made by the firing pin, he said, are consistent with a Springfield XDS handgun — the same gun Mullen had bought.
Throughout cross-examination of several witnesses, Crew’s lawyers asked about the possibility the gun went off by accident in the woods that night.
When it came time for Chief Deputy Public Defender Andy Howard to put on his case, he called an investigator from his office to the witness stand.
Alexis Climes, manager of investigations for the Allegheny County Public Defender’s office, said she went to the scene where Spicuzza’s body was found and took measurements of the terrain — including the slope of the area — in an attempt to determine the angle from which Spicuzza was shot.
Climes told the jury that she marked several spots in the area around Spicuzza’s body. She then used red string to connect the stakes she placed and a tape measure to calculate the rise and run. The defense entered dozens of photographs documenting her measurements.
Throughout the testimony, Deputy District Attorney Emma Schoedel objected, noting that Climes was not qualified as an expert to offer opinions.
Judge Edward J. Borkowski allowed Climes to continue her testimony, before breaking for the day with the investigator still on the stand.
With the jury out of the room, the judge then asked Howard what Climes’ ultimate conclusion would be.
Howard said he planned to ask Climes if she could determine the angle of the shot based on the measurements she made, and her answer would be that she could not because she didn’t have enough information.
Borkowski said he would not permit that question.
“As to the angle of the shot, I’m going to exclude that,” he said.
Howard told the court that he expects to call an Allegheny County homicide detective Friday to question him about the department’s media policy and potential racial bias in the case.
During his opening statement, Howard told the jury that investigators got tunnel vision early on because the victim was a white woman, and the suspect, a young Black man.