Shortly before midnight on Jan. 26, 2022, a group of masked men wearing black clothing robbed four drug dealers, Erie County First Assistant District Attorney Jessica Reger outlined in court on Thursday.
The drug dealers, four young men from Arizona, had come to Erie “to do a terrible thing” — to sell fentanyl pills, she said.
As the Arizona group was settled in a short-term rental house in the 3900 block of McClelland Avenue, after spending the day at the Millcreek Mall, ordering pizza, watching TV and getting high as they prepared to head home the following day, a group of Erie residents, masked and with guns, burst in, Reger said.
Gunshots were exchanged inside the house before the masked individuals fled. One of them, 30-year-old Shannon Crosby, was left for dead in the roadway outside, Reger said in her opening statement at the start of trial for 36-year-old Derrick S. Wright.
Nearly a year after Crosby’s death, Erie police in December 2022 charged Wright and three others — Julia D. Gaerttner, 33; Marsea S. Jones, 21; and Jamie D. Smith Jr., 21 — with criminal homicide, conspiracy, second-degree murder, robbery and other offenses in the raid on the McClelland Avenue residence and Crosby’s killing.