Jury spares killer of armored van guards
After deliberating for nearly four hours today, a jury of seven women and five men decided that Mustafa Ali should be imprisoned for life without parole for the 2007 double murder of two Loomis armored van guards.
After deliberating for nearly four hours today, a jury of seven women and five men decided that Mustafa Ali should be imprisoned for life without parole for the 2007 double murder of two Loomis armored van guards.
The jury, which could have condemned Ali, 39, to death by lethal injection, returned its verdict shortly after 6:30 p.m.
This morning, the jurors heard impassioned closing arguments from Assistant District Attorney Michael Barry and defense attorney Marc A. Bookman.
As the families of the two slain guards - William Widmaier, 65, of Fairless Hills, and Joseph Alullo, 54, of Levittown - wept openly in the packed courtroom, Barry argued strongly for a death sentence.
Barry cited four legal factors he said justified a death sentence: the double murders and the fact that they occurred during a robbery, Ali's endangering of civilians during the shootout outside a busy Northeast intersection and his federal conviction in five 1992 bank robberies.
The prosecutor urged the jury to discount defense testimony about Ali's early childhood deprivation and abandonment and a poignant video of Ali talking with sons Naqi, 9, and Taqi, 6, in telephone calls from the city's Curran-Fromhold Correction Facility.
Barry added that Ali also loved his sons during the Oct. 4, 2007 shootout in which he devastated the Alullo and Widmaier families: "Give his kids as much thought as he gave their kids that day - practically none."
Bookman, one of three Public Defenders representing Ali, told the jury that it is impossible to excuse the two murders because of Ali's childhood.
"There's no explanation, no logic, no reason. It's impossible for me to do that," Bookman said.
Nevertheless, Bookman urged the jury consider the whole man: "He's not a monster. You have to see the humanity there."
In deliberating on whether Ali should be sentenced to death by lethal injection or life in prison without chance of parole, the jury weighed the so-called aggravating and mitigating factors.
The trial began Feb. 1 and came to an end last Wednesday with two guilty verdicts of first-degree murder. The jury began hearing evidence in the trial's penalty phase on Friday.
The jury found that Ali purposely shot and killed the guards as they serviced an outdoor ATM at a Wachovia Bank branch at Bustleton and Bleigh Avenues at Roosevelt Mall.
The slain guards were retired city police officers. The Loomis driver, Joseph Walczak, 72, of Frankford, was injured by flying glass when a shot shattered the van's bulletproof window.