A jury got to see the horrifying moment a woman with a gun shot a Brooklyn mom in the head in front of her friends — along with video of police unwittingly letting the alleged killer go because they mistakenly thought the culprit was a man.
The chilling footage ran on the first day of suspected killer Claudia Banton’s Brooklyn Supreme Court trial Monday for the murder of 42-year-old Delia Johnson, and left one of the victim’s family friends so shaken that she had to look away from the screen.
Banton, 46, a longtime friend of Johnson and her family, is accused of executing Johnson after the two women had talked at a neighborhood funeral.
The motive for the crime remains a mystery.
Assistant D.A. Michael Diamond described a shift in demeanor between the two women, while Banton’s lawyer argued that detectives arrested the wrong woman and said Banton has no motive at all.
“They got nothing, and that’s because there’s a simple reason: My client didn’t have a motive. She didn’t do it,” defense lawyer Jonathan Strauss said.
Johnson was holding court with a group of people by a stoop on Franklin Ave. at Prospect Place in Crown Heights at about 9:40 p.m. Aug. 4, 2021, wearing a bright red dress, when a blonde woman in a black outfit walked out of a double-parked white Mercedes, shot her in the head, then fired again after she hit the ground.
The shooter then calmly walked off.
The people of Franklin Ave. had gathered for a funeral, for a man by the name of Red,” Diamond told jurors Monday. “This defendant chose to take that celebration and forced the people of Franklin Ave. to watch as she gunned down Delia Johnson — cold-blooded murder.”
Banton can be seen on video pulling up at the funeral in her white Mercedes earlier in the evening, and she became the center of attention as she walked out and talked to Johnson and others.
“But you’ll see something change. You’ll hear it too,’” the prosecutor said. “You’re going to see the demeanor change between the defendant and Delia Johnson. Delia is really starting to separate herself, move away from the defendant and that white Mercedes.”
A parade of NYPD witnesses introduced jurors to video of the shooting, as well as body camera footage showing the chaos afterwards. Several police officers responding to another call heard the shots from nearby, and came running, while four cops with the 77th Precinct’s Public Safety team rushed to the scene in an unmarked car.
Some of the cops tried to manage the distraught crowd and perform CPR, pumping on Johnson’s chest and trying to keep her pulse from fading before an ambulance arrived.
The Public Safety cops fanned out and frantically asked witnesses to describe the shooter, and got a half-wrong, half-right answer — the killer was a man with blue pants, who fled in a white Mercedes.
Within seconds, the four officers piled into their car and quickly found a car matching what they’d heard but the driver wouldn’t pull over. Officer Tiffany Martinez testified that she and her partners had to cut the Mercedes off to stop the car.
“I got out of the car, and I approached the driver,” she said, describing who she saw, a blonde woman in a black top, black pants and sneakers. She looked inside the car, saw no one else inside and saw no weapons, though she did spy some luggage, she testifies.
“I swear to God I didn’t see you! I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you,” the driver told the officers. And because the driver was a she, not a he, the officers cut her loose within seconds.
“That will be the last time you see the defendant look that way. After that, she can’t look like that again,” Diamond siad.
Investigators realized their mistake a couple of hours later, when they saw the footage of the shooting.
Diamond said detectives reviewed the body camera footage, and linked the Mercedes’ license plate to a Claudia Williams in Georgia, one of the names and addresses Banton uses.
Police caught up with Banton in Jacksonville, Fla. in November 2021. Her hair was no longer blond, Diamond said.
Strauss argued that the detectives picked up the wrong woman, and likened the prosecution’s argument to a well-made trailer for a bad movie.
“They left out a lot of stuff,” he said, noting that prosecutors plan to introduce two identification witnesses who didn’t see the shooting, one of whom hasn’t laid eyes on Banton for 20 years.
“You’ll see the person that actually shot Delia Johnson,” Strauss said of the footage, “And I’ll submit to you, it isn’t the woman sitting here.”
The trial continues on Tuesday.
