Man found guilty, sent to prison for life for killing teen during robbery in downtown North Little Rock

North Little Rock police work Thursday, July 9, 2015, at the downtown U.S. Bank, where a man was hurt and his vehicle stolen.
North Little Rock police work Thursday, July 9, 2015, at the downtown U.S. Bank, where a man was hurt and his vehicle stolen.

A Pulaski County jury took 20 minutes Thursday to reject Zavier Marquis Pree's claims that he was duped into confessing to capital murder, finding the 21-year-old Jacksonville man guilty as charged and sending him to prison for life.

All of the evidence led to Pree being the robber who killed Aaron Crawford, 18, and stole his car in July 2015 in the parking lot behind the U.S. Bank building in downtown North Little Rock, prosecutors said.

They were speaking literally when referring to the first piece of evidence found by police, a Google map on Crawford's cellphone that showed a route from the site of the shooting back to the street where Pree lived.

North Little Rock police found the dead man's car parked across the street from Pree's home, then arrested him when he got into the red 2006 Dodge Magnum and started driving.

"This is nothing short of coldblooded," deputy prosecutor Scott Duncan told jurors as he showed them an autopsy photo of Crawford's face.

The bullet, which penetrated his brain, had been fired so close that gunpowder particles were embedded in his skin.

"He told you he did it," Duncan said, referring to the video of Pree's interrogation played for jurors during the two-day trial.

"You heard Zavier Pree tell you through his statement he fired the gun."

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Interviewed by police, Pree initially claimed he'd borrowed the car from a friend, but changed his story at least five times during questioning.

In two of those stories, Pree acknowledged shooting Crawford but for different reasons, including self-defense when the younger man tried to rob him.

"Lies upon lies upon lies upon lies upon lies ... he was given opportunity after opportunity to explain himself," Duncan said. "This man executed a plan to rob Aaron Crawford, and clearly he did so."

Pree's attorneys suggested a friend of the defendant's was the real killer. But if that were true, Duncan asked jurors, why didn't Pree tell police when he was being questioned?

Unbeknownst to jurors, Pree was heading to prison for 11 years, regardless of their verdict, for aggravated robbery, theft and first-degree battery convictions resulting from his partnership with two other men in five armed robberies, four of them at convenience stores, in Little Rock over a two-month span in the summer of 2015.

They called themselves the Taliban Gang for the way they wrapped shirts over their faces so their victims could see only their eyes.

Pree still faces federal charges over the holdups. His attorneys said he was the getaway driver. His two co-defendants are already in prison.

The last robbery attributed to the gang was about two weeks before Crawford was killed.

Thursday, defense attorney Omar Green called his client "naive," telling jurors that Pree was an unsophisticated 19-year-old when police questioned him in Crawford's death.

Pree had been coaxed into admitting he'd shot Crawford by North Little Rock detective Dane Pedersen, Green told jurors.

"He wore that kid down, not in an illegal or mean way," Green said. "He's just that good at his job, getting people to talk."

As evidence of Pree's mental state, Green noted that the defendant asked for his mother 18 times during questioning and seemed to think he would be allowed to go home once questioning was over.

Pree was interrogated over a five-hour span during which police left him alone in an interrogation room for up to an hour, despite Pree saying he was claustrophobic and afraid to be alone, Green said.

The only witness who claimed to have seen Crawford's killer was presented by the defense to bolster the argument that someone else had been in the car with Crawford and Pree when the 18-year-old was shot.

Khayam Shakeem Thomas, 38, had been across the street when Crawford was shot and told jurors he heard the mortally wounded man crying for help while staggering through the bank parking lot.

Questioned by the defense, he told jurors that Crawford told him that "they" had stolen his car.

But when questioned by Duncan, Thomas told jurors -- twice -- that Pree was the man he saw driving away in the victim's vehicle while he was trying to help Crawford.

The defense said Thomas never told police he saw anyone else, and Pree's lawyers accused Thomas of changing his story for trial because he has learned since the slaying that Crawford is a distant relative.

Pree's defense also suffered a blow when Circuit Judge Herb Wright blocked lawyers from calling as a witness a psychologist who had examined Pree.

The psychologist's testimony would have showed jurors that because of Pree's IQ, age and physical development, Pree would have been especially susceptible to police interrogation tactics and could have been induced to falsely confess to the slaying, Green told the judge.

Duncan asked that the testimony be prohibited, telling the judge he'd only been told the day before trial that the psychologist, James Moneypenny, would be called to testify, giving prosecutors no time to prepare.

The judge agreed to bar Moneypenny, saying that not only had the defense attorneys failed to give prosecutors proper notice of his testimony, they had also not submitted sufficient evidence that Moneypenny was an expert in the false confession phenomena.

Metro on 07/28/2017

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