A jury convicted triggerman Dexter Bostic of murdering Officer Russel Timoshenko Friday night, ensuring he will rot in prison.
The verdict – guilty on all counts – was handed down after 14 hours of deliberations over two days.
“It was a pretty watertight case,” said a 29-year-old juror, the only white person on the jury of 10 African-Americans and one Latino.
“The men [on the jury] were saying, ‘These were bad dudes, these were gang bangers,’” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “We felt they were on a crime spree that weekend.”
The decision came as a relief to Timoshenko’s parents, who were shocked when another jury acquitted Bostic’s co-defendant, Robert Ellis, two days earlier.
A third jury will continue deliberating the fate of the final suspect, Lee Woods, on Monday.
The most horrific part of the Dexter Bostic conviction is that it was based on a crime that happened inside a car that Robert Ellis, who was not convicted of murder last week, was driving. Defense lawyers made a point of telling everyone that he wasn’t, in fact, the shooter, and was just the driver in a car where the shooting happened. Well, now that we know for sure that one of the passengers in the car did, in fact, kill Russell Timoshenko, how can Richard Ellis walk on the murder rap?
That doesn’t make any sense to anyone with half a brain.
Put that in context with the absolute insane vigor that the prosecutors in the Bronx are using to go after actor Lillo Brancato, Jr., a case the jury is still deliberating on.
A Bronx jury finished its third day of deliberations yesterday without a verdict in the cop-killing trial of actor-turned-drug addict Lillo Brancato.
The panel, after announcing a day earlier that it was deadlocked by a single holdout, deliberated all day until being dismissed at 4 p.m.
The jury, which spent its first day in acrimonious talks, will return Monday.
Brancato, 32, is charged with felony murder in the Dec. 10, 2005, shooting of off-duty Officer Daniel Enchautegui. Brancato’s drug-addled friend, Steven Armento, shot the three-year veteran.
Note that Brancato was charged with murder even though he wasn’t the trigger man. If the jury found that Ellis didn’t pull the trigger based on testimony that proved that at least one of the other passengers of the car he was driving did, why is he not guilty of murder? I don’t know anyone in this city, police officer or civilian, who isn’t baffled by the Ellis / Bostic / Woods case, and it ought to be interesting to see the verdict when the jury gets back on the Brancato case because the situations are almost identical.
My guess is that Brancato gets put away and we’re left scratching our heads trying to figure out how Ellis beat a clear-cut murder rap.