Jersey man tracked ex-girlfriend’s car before murdering her: prosecutors

September 19, 2019 Noah Goldberg

Brooklyn Supreme Court. Eagle file photo by Rob Abruzzese

Brooklyn Supreme and Family Court. Photo: Rob Abruzzese/Brooklyn Eagle

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A New Jersey man who allegedly murdered his ex-girlfriend in Canarsie in late 2016 spent the days before the killing tracking her movements after installing a GPS device on the bottom of her car, prosecutors said Thursday.

Keon Richmond is on trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court for allegedly shooting his ex-girlfriend — a 25-year-old rookie Department of Correction officer — five times at point blank range, killing her. The two dated in the years before the murder, but the relationship had soured, and they were no longer dating, prosecutors said.

“Unbeknownst to her as she was just going about her ordinary tasks, everything that she was doing was being followed, was being monitored, was being tracked,” said Assistant District Attorney Olatokunbo Olaniyan during opening statements Thursday in the Brooklyn Supreme Court trial.

On the evening of Dec. 4, 2016, as Bryan was getting ready to go to work her night shift on Rikers Island, Richmond allegedly hopped in his new girlfriend’s car and drove it from his home in Patterson, New Jersey to Bryan’s Canarsie home where she lived with her sister and mother. Richmond’s new girlfriend’s car’s, which he was allegedly driving, was captured on NYPD and MTA cameras entering the state from New Jersey before the time of the murder, and leaving after the murder, according to prosecutors.

Richmond circled the block and waited as Bryan said goodbye to her mother before work, and then parked his car directly across from hers, prosecutors said.

Bryan’s mother, Ingrid Bryan, testified Thursday about the last time she saw her daughter, as she left their home for work. “She was going to work. She was asleep when I got home from work. She had on her uniform pants and a white shirt,” Bryan testified.

After Bryan left for Rikers and got in her car, Richmond made his move, according to the DA.

“He waited and he waited, until the moment was just right and then you’re going to hear that he got out of his car, he came up behind hers, approached the driver’s window where she was seated and he reached out his .38 revolver and fired,” Olaniyan told jurors. “And I’m not talking about once or twice — not even three times. You’re going to hear that he fired again and again and again until he was good and sure that Alastasia Bryan was gone.”

While Bryan’s mother did not see the shooting — or Richmond at the scene — she heard the gunshots from her home.

“I heard a gunshot when she left — like five minutes, seven minutes after. Pow. Pow. Pow,” Bryan said.

Bryan texted her daughter immediately after hearing the gunshots. “Stacey, you hear the gunshot?” Bryan texted her daughter, using a nickname for Alastasia. “No response. Text her again, ‘call me text me,’ no response,” Bryan testified.

She then went outside where she saw her daughter’s car riddled with bullets. “I didn’t even see her because everybody pulled me back,” Bryan said.

Richmond’s defense attorney, Gregory Watts, meanwhile, argued that the case was not as clean-cut as prosecutors made it out to be, and he advised jurors not to “drink the Kool-Aid.”

Watts said during his opening that no physical evidence tied Richmond to the murder scene. “There is nothing, nothing connecting Mr. Richmond to the scene,” Watts said. “Nothing. Nada.”

While the prosecution secured surveillance footage from the block of the murder, “the people cannot identify who the assailant is in that video that they just talked about,” Watts said. “The people has no eyewitnesses saying that Keon Richmond placed a tracking device on Alastasia Bryan’s vehicle.”

Watts said the prosecution’s case was based solely on “technology” and that their tracking of Richmond’s movements by his cellphone location aren’t perfect.