There was a moment in court Wednesday when it almost seemed liked Sheena Robinson-Crews, the widow of a Trenton gang member, was on trial. Her testimony was marked by startling admissions and terse denials.
Yes, Robinson-Crews said, she refused to cooperate with the authorities, even misled them, for several hours after her husband, Tracy Crews, was shot in the neck Sept. 12, 2008 inside their Whittaker Avenue residence.
But, no, Robinson-Crews said, she didn’t orchestrate her husband’s murder, despite suspicions from some of Crews’ family members that she was somehow involved and an implication from the defense that she tampered with a police investigation by deleting messages off one of her husband’s phones.
Robinson-Crews said she initially refused to speak with police for three hours so she could see if her husband’s friends planned to retaliate.
When Robinson-Crews finally did give a statement in the early-morning hours of Sept. 13, it was laced with lies, she testified, that hindered investigators in the critical hours after Crews’ death. So, too, were follow-up statements she gave to police months and even years later, implicating defendants William Brown and Nigel Joseph Dawson.
Robinson-Crews never betrayed any emotion while denying under oath that she had anything to do with her husband’s death or that their marriage was on the verge of collapse about a month after they wed at a private, small ceremony in Ewing where Brown was the best man. She responded to each of attorney Edward Hesketh’s accusations in a low, monotone voice.
She didn’t react when Hesketh suggested she was more interested in assuming the reins of her husband’s lucrative drug-dealing business than finding his killers.
She denied telling an inmate, Maria Cappelli, who was housed with her at a state prison in Pennsylvania where she served time for a drug offense, that she was “remorseful” for setting up her husband’s murder. She denied ever handing the killers keys to the couple’s apartment or giving them a time they’d be home. She denied sending her husband into the apartment alone “because she knew what was going to happen.”
“I didn’t have a conversation with her about this incident,” Robinson-Crews said. She added she was “cordial” with Cappelli, but they didn’t have “conversations.” They simply exchanged pleasantries whenever they’d encountered each other in prison and occasionally played Spades, a popular card game among the inmates.
The lead police detective who worked the murder case has previously testified at a hearing outside of the jury’s presence he believed Cappelli was “posturing” and her story was “unreliable.”
While Robinson-Crews acknowledged her husband was a member of the G-Shine set of the Bloods street gang, she disputed he was a “high-ranking” member and denied she used a purported strain within the organization to convince the killers to eliminate her husband.
“He was just a regular gang member,” Robinson-Crews said of her husband. “He didn’t give orders,” he took them.
“If you weren’t involved in the homicide,” Hesketh wondered, “why would you lie to the police?”
Privately, members of Crews’ family wondered the same thing. They found it odd Robinson-Crews remained outside while her husband went inside to put the couple’s 2-year-old daughter to sleep.
Robinson-Crews, who was eight months pregnant at the time of her husband’s murder, told a jury Tuesday she was parked outside in her BMW talking to a friend about her upcoming baby shower when she heard shots ring out.
Moments later, she testified, a half-dressed man staggered to a package liquor store on the corner. That’s when she realized it was her husband and rushed to his side.
The story she gave detectives Sept. 13 was dramatically different from her testimony. Robinson-Crews’ actions the night of the murder originally aroused police’s suspicions.
Video played for the jury this week captured Robinson-Crews making a number of phone calls shortly after her husband was loaded onto a gurney and transported to a local hospital where he later died.
Two of her phone calls were overhead by a police detective and was foundation for a search warrant to scour her phone logs. In one of the phone conversations, she was overheard telling someone police believed was the killer, “You didn’t have to shoot him. You got what you came for. You didn’t have to shoot him.”
She was overheard in a second phone conversation telling another person, “Those boys didn’t have to shoot him.”
Robinson-Crews’ actions at police headquarters proved confounding to investigators. At first, she was mum. Then when she talked, she gave investigators conflicting information investigators knew wasn’t true.
Some of the lies were inconsequential; others were weighty.
For example, Robinson-Crews lied about purchasing a Snapple apple juice from the package liquor store on the corner to put in her daughter’s sippy cup. She was unable to explain to the jury why she lied about something so trivial.
Authorities’ ears perked up when they asked Robinson-Crews how she was feeling. She responded, “Terrible. Family thinks I had something to do with it.”
During the same interview, Robinson-Crews told police she had grown tired of her husband’s constant smoking and hanging out with friends and was “ready for a divorce.”
Defense attorneys pounced on the statement as proof there was discord in the couple’s relationship. But Robinson-Crews said she told her husband that to coerce him from hanging out with the “company he was keeping,” but that it was an empty threat.
“That was something to shake him up,” she said.
One notable fabrication that surfaced Wednesday was that Robinson-Crews had originally told police she was inside the home when her husband was shot. She told police she heard her husband arguing with someone inside the home, heard people tussling upstairs and yelled out her husband’s name.
Then she heard a succession of shots before her husband emerged from another room “bloody as hell.” She claimed she tried helping him out the front door of their apartment, but he kept falling.
In the middle of the chaos, she told police, she saw “black fly,” referring to two black males, wearing dark clothing, jetting out of the residence. Although they had no ski masks on, she didn’t see their faces. Robinson-Crews admitted she was actually outside in her car when he husband was shot.
“All lies,” Hesketh said. “Six hours after your husband was killed.”
The police, pointing to the inconsistencies, had at one point told Robinson-Crews she needed to come clean. Evidence at the scene, such as a ski mask, and surveillance footage obtained by law enforcement undermined Robinson-Crews’ account.
“We need to know the truth,” detectives said, according to a transcript of the conversation read in court.
When Hesketh was finished with his cross examination, it was Steven Lember’s turn to ask questions. He zeroed in on a false allegation Robinson-Crews made against his client. She claimed Brown pulled alongside her vehicle and pointed a handgun at her in the presence of some of her friends after the murder and about 10 days after she gave birth to her second child.
Lember said Robinson-Crews tried to encourage friends to provide police with statements supporting her accusation.
“You accused him of an aggravated assault and you knew it was false?” Lember asked.
“Correct,” Robinson-Crews said.
Before departing the witness stand, Robinson-Crews was asked by the prosecutor, Al Garcia, to explain away the repeated fabrications.
She was scared, she told the jury. Scared for her safety. And, yes, she said, she was scared of being prosecuted. But not for the murder of her husband, she said, but rather because she was complicit in his drug enterprise.
“I felt like an unfit mother,” she said. “And I didn’t want to be judged.”
Months after her husband’s was killed, Robinson-Crews was arrested with another man in Morrisville, Pa., for selling heroin. Long before the jury returns a verdict in this case, it will certainly pass judgment on Robinson-Crews.
But the question jurors will ask themselves has nothing to do with whether Robinson-Crews betrayed her husband. They will instead ask themselves whether her word be trusted enough to send two men to jail for the rest of their lives.