South Phila. man charged in triple homicide
A South Philadelphia man serving a long prison term for a violent home-invasion robbery has been charged as one of two gunmen in the 2014 execution-style slayings of three men in Lawncrest.
A South Philadelphia man serving a long prison term for a violent home-invasion robbery has been charged as one of two gunmen in the 2014 execution-style slayings of three men in Lawncrest.
The charges against Quadir Jeffries, 24, were announced Thursday by District Attorney Seth Williams after what he said was a two-year probe that employed an investigating grand jury to corroborate a trail of circumstantial evidence incriminating Jeffries.
"Quadir Jeffries committed a horrible triple murder," Williams told reporters, adding that it took a grand jury to obtain testimony from reluctant witnesses.
Along the way, Williams said, investigators cleared two men whom some witnesses had identified as the pair who left a house in the 6300 block of Martins Mill Road after the Feb. 13, 2014, shootings of Keurlin Charles, 25; Brian Williams, 25; and Vagner Freemont, 34.
Williams said Charles had been selling marijuana from the house, where he lived with his parents, and that robbery was the motive for the killings. The house was ransacked and no drugs were found except a half-ounce of marijuana in Brian Williams' pocket.
All three men were shot in the head. Freemont and Charles had been bound with electric cords cut from a television and an iron.
The first link to Jeffries was a fired cartridge casing - a 9mm Luger full-metal jacket made by PMC - found in the house. It matched a casing found 26 days earlier in a home invasion in the 4200 block of North Seventh Street in Hunting Park, in which one man was pistol-whipped and another shot and wounded.
Jeffries and Alonzo Wallace, 48, and Hakim Blatch, 34, were arrested in the Hunting Park incident and in December were found guilty of conspiracy, burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault. Wallace was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison, Blatch to 23 to 46 years, and Jeffries to 20 to 40 years.
Knowing that the same 9mm pistol had been used in both crimes, Williams said, investigators began tracking Jeffries' cellphone use, which put the phone in the vicinity of the Martins Mill house before and after the killings.
Among the links between Jeffries and the gun was a photo on his cellphone of a box of the Luger ammunition used in the Hunting Park and Lawncrest incidents.
Finally, detectives determined that Jeffries had used Brian Williams' bank card at 10 locations after the slayings.
"It took a lot of connecting of the dots to put this case together," said Assistant District Attorney Andrew Notaristefano.
Notaristefano said about two-dozen homicide investigators led by Detective Laura Hammond spent 11/2 years building the case against Jeffries. "We foreclosed all possible defenses in this case," Notaristefano added. "All of the evidence kept pointing down to Quadir Jeffries."
According to court records, Jeffries has a series of arrests for robbery, assault, and gun crimes that include an attempted murder charge resulting from a 2010 shootout in South Philadelphia.
Until his conviction and sentence in the Hunting Park case, Jeffries' only conviction was a 2010 guilty plea to a charge of carrying a firearm without a license. He was sentenced to four years' probation.
The other alleged gunman in the triple homicide, Cori Thompson, 22, was charged in the slayings last October and is awaiting trial.
Notaristefano said Thompson is not cooperating with prosecutors and would likely be tried separately from Jeffries.
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