Florida Quadruple Homicide Verdict in Live Feed

Just over three years ago, a toddler wearing nothing but a diaper was found abandoned on a porch of a house on Potomac Avenue.

It was the first clue in what would turn out to be a grisly triple homicide.

Hours after the child was found and as police were trying to figure out who he was and how he ended up on that porch, workers at an industrial site in Black Rock called authorities with a terrifying discovery: the burned remains of a van and two skeletons inside.

Soon, local and federal authorities would discover that the remains were those of the little boy's parents and a fourth person the family was with had also been killed, chopped up and then burned to near ashes in a firepit on Box Avenue on other side of town.

On Tuesday, the trial began against Deandre Wilson, the man federal prosecutors say set up a plot to rob the victims of cocaine and then shot and killed them before taking part in burning the bodies in an effort to conceal the crimes.

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Noelvin Valentin

All of the other defendants in the case have already pleaded guilty.

In his opening statements before U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi said the killings of Miguel Anthony Valentin-Colon and Nicole Marie Merced-Plaud, and their friend, Dhamyl Roman-Audiffred, were all about money.

"He did it for greed," Tripi told the jury.

Tripi said Wilson, who was in court, had killed the trio as part of a scheme to rob them of cocaine which he wanted to sell.

Tripi said the victims had an arrangement with Wilson's friends – Jariel Cobb and his brother James Reed – to ferry large amounts of cocaine from Florida where they lived to Buffalo.

"They were drug dealers," Tripi acknowledged. But, he said, "they were people. They were parents. They were friends. They were children."

The trio and the toddler drove to Buffalo in a rented van on Sept. 15, 2019, and first went to a house on Lisbon Avenue where they had made deliveries before. But then they were diverted to a house on Roebling Avenue.

There, Tripi told the jury, testimony will show that Wilson put on a mask, went into a bathroom and then came out with a gun. Tripi said he beat Roman-Audiffred with the gun and then shot her. Then he went outside and shot Valentin-Colon and Merced-Plaud as they sat in the van. Then, Tripi alleged, Wilson dragged Valentin-Colon out of the driver's seat of the van and put him in the second row on the floor. Then, prosecutors say, they drove the van to a secluded spot and left it there, with the child, Noelvin, still inside. Tripi accused Wilson of leaving the child in the van with his dead parents for about eight hours until he returned with a co-conspirators and then moved it to an open field off Tonawanda Street where they torched the van and took the boy, subsequently leaving him on the porch.

Tripi said the prosecution has multiple sources of evidence – from Google cloud GPS locations to city and FBI cameras – that put Wilson in all the key parts of the crime – from where the shootings took place to where they bodies were eventually found.

Tripi also told the jury that Cobb and Reed, who pleaded guilty this summer to narcotics distribution and setting a fire to destroy evidence, were going to testify against Wilson and finger him as the killer.

Wilson's attorneys, in their opening statement, said that's all the prosecution has – the testimony of two "snitches" who are hoping for a lighter sentence.

"They'll say whatever they think the government wants to hear," said attorney Daniel Henry Jr.

The first witnesses in the case gave testimony Tuesday.

First to take the stand was Lois Augsburger, the retired bartender, who walked out on to her front porch on the morning of Sept. 16, 2019, and saw Noelvin crawl out from a box she leaves outside for stray cats.

"It scared me," she told the jury. "I said: What are you doing here?" She scooped up the nearly naked boy and wrapped him in her flannel nightgown. "He hugged me," she said. She ran to a neighbor and asked him to call the police.

Also taking the stand was Zenaida Colon, Valentin-Colon's mother. She recalled how she was at work in Orlando on Sept. 16, 2019, when a relative texted her frantically with a photo of Noelvin that was circulating as an unidentified child who had just been found in Buffalo. Colon said she didn't know that her son and family were in Buffalo. She got on a plane to Buffalo and arrived by evening.

She said she was at a Buffalo police station when she heard a detective say a burned car had been found. "At that moment, I was thinking that was my son," she said. Colon has been Noelvin's guardian since the slayings.

Also testifying were the men who found the burned car next to 111 Tonawanda St. that evening.

Robert Lyons of Buffalo Business Interior recounted that a co-worker had gone out back after they had noticed damage to a gate in the easement next to the building.

The co-worker spotted the badly charred remnants of a car.

Lyons recalled saying to him: "Hopefully, there aren't any dead bodies in there."

The co-worker replied: "There is a dead body."

Lyons said he looked inside and saw skeletal remains in the front passenger side. A closer look revealed a second skeleton behind the driver's seat. Jurors were shown photos of the burnt remnants.

The trial is scheduled to resume Wednesday with testimony from police and crime scene investigators. Wolford said she expected the trial to continue until early November.

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Source: https://buffalonews.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/a-burned-car-charred-remains-and-an-abandoned-toddler-trial-in-grisly-2019-triple-homicide/article_2286ee34-3eac-11ed-abab-f71b2030e3e1.html

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