Valentine's Day double-murder trial begins

ON VALENTINE'S DAY 2011, cops went to a house in Frankford, near Oxford Circle, where two young women were found riddled with bullets, a prosecutor told a jury at the start of a capital-murder trial yesterday.

"The house is eerily quiet," said Assistant District Attorney Thomas Lipscomb. "When they go up the steps, they see a scene of horror" in the house on Rutland Street near Cheltenham Avenue.

Police Officer Heather Andrews testified that she and her partner responded to the radio call, at about 3:45 p.m. When they got to the second-floor back bedrooms, they separated.

"I could see moccasins, feet sticking out from" one room, she said. There, she discovered Tiffany Barnhill, 19, lying on the floor. Her partner, she said, found Marcedes Ivery, 21, Barnhill's cousin, in the other bedroom, "hanging off the bed."

Both women were dead.

On trial before a Common Pleas jury, charged in the double-Valentine's Day murders, is Shaun Warrick, 32, who was Barnhill's new boyfriend at the time. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against him.

Lipscomb told jurors that Barnhill and Warrick were having some trouble. And on Valentine's Day, Warrick drove to the Rutland Street house with two other women - Alicia Watkins and Octavia Dugger.

After Warrick kicked in the front door and went in the house, Watkins and Dugger heard gunshots, Lipscomb said.

Defense attorney Jack McMahon told the panel of six men and six women that they would have to judge the credibility of the commonwealth's witnesses - especially that of Watkins and Dugger.

The two women didn't go to police, he said. Only a month after the slayings, when they "were reluctantly pulled into homicide," did they point their fingers at Warrick because they feared they could be charged, he said.

McMahon also suggested there was another man in the house with Barnhill and Ivery at the time they were killed. "Is he the shooter?" the defense attorney asked. "What issues did he have?"

He pointed out that neither Watkins nor Dugger saw a gun on Warrick when they were with him on that Valentine's Day, nor did they see anything like a "bulge" that indicated he had a gun.

Kim Ivery, Marcedes' mother, testified that Marcedes was living with her in the Rutland Street house at the time. She said Marcedes and Barnhill had stayed at a friend's house that weekend, and then came to her house about 7 a.m. that Monday, Valentine's Day.

She said she met Warrick for the first time when he came to her house in a black car with tinted windows about 1 a.m. the Sunday before Valentine's. He dropped off bags of Barnhill's clothes.

Then, on Valentine's Day, when Barnhill and Marcedes were in the house, Kim Ivery said she asked Barnhill, "What's wrong?" and if Warrick "put you out?" noting he had dumped her clothes at the house the day before.

Barnhill said "no," but then said Warrick was outside the house. Kim Ivery said she then saw Barnhill leave the house and go into Warrick's car, which then drove away. She estimated it was about 9:30 a.m. She said she left her house to go to a doctor's appointment about 10 or 11 a.m.

Watkins, 31, testified yesterday that she didn't know either victim. But she was friends with Warrick, with whom she had grown up. On Valentine's Day 2011, when he drove up in his black Pontiac to her house on Duncannon Avenue near Warnock Street in Logan and wanted her to beat up another woman, she didn't blink an eye.

She assumed the other woman was Warrick's girlfriend.

"If that's my friend and he asked me to go do something, then, yes, I'm going to beat her up," she testified.

Watkins said she got her best friend, Dugger, who also lived on Duncannon, to go along. The three drove to Rutland Street.

Watkins testified that when they got to the Rutland Street house, Warrick kicked in the door, then went in. She said she and Dugger waited outside for a while, then heard gunshots. She said she didn't know what happened inside the house. She and Dugger ran back to the car, and Warrick ran back, too.

Asked by Lipscomb if Warrick said anything in the car as he drove her and Dugger back to Duncannon Avenue, Watkins said she couldn't recall.

The next day, she said, she saw Warrick and told him that her grandmother had seen news reports of the murders.

"He [Warrick] said, 'I f---ed up,' " Watkins testified.

Under cross-examination, McMahon asked Watkins about her March 14, 2011, statement to homicide detectives. In it, she said Warrick at some point during their ride up to Rutland Street relayed to her that the other two women - Ivery and Barnhill - called him on his cellphone and there was a guy on the phone, too.

McMahon contended that there was another man in the Rutland Street house at the time with Ivery and Barnhill.

Watkins said she only heard a female voice on the other end of the phone and didn't hear any male voice. She said she didn't know if the other man was on a three-way call or if there was a man actually with the other two women.

The trial continues today.