Man on trial in mass shooting at Edmondson Village Shopping Center

With a poster board behind him that contained multiple autopsy photos, Maryland Assistant Medical Examiner Edernst Noncent answered questions from an assistant state’s attorney about the aftermath of a mass shooting in the Edmondson Village Shopping Center in Baltimore that killed one high school student and wounded four others.

“How many gunshot wounds did the victim sustain?” she asked.

“Sixteen,” he replied.

The cause of death, he said, was multiple gunshot wounds. The manner of death was homicide.

Noncent testified on Thursday in Baltimore Circuit Court as the trial began for Daaon Spears, who’s accused of being one of two gunmen who opened fire into a crowd outside the Popeyes in the Edmondson Village Shopping Center on Jan. 4, 2023, killing Deanta Dorsey, a sophomore at Edmondson-Westside High School. He was 16.

Spears, 18, of Edmondson Village, is charged with first-degree murder and related offenses. At the time, he was 16.

Circuit Judge Robert K. Taylor Jr. is presiding over the trial, which will continue Friday.

In her opening statement, Assistant State’s Attorney Rita Wisthoff-Ito said Spears and another man, Bryan Johnson, went to the shopping center and opened fire.

Johnson, 18, of Shipley Hill, is charged with first-degree murder and related offenses. At the time, he was 16.

Wisthoff-Ito described the case as circumstantial. But she noted that circumstantial evidence carries the same weight as direct evidence.

She plans to introduce surveillance video, which she said shows Spears and Johnson walking to the shopping center and running away after the shooting.

Though jurors cannot read minds, Wisthoff-Ito said, they can inter through his actions that Spears intended to kill. She did not offer a motive for the shooting.

“Luckily for this defendant, we’re not here for five homicides,” Wisthoff-Ito said.

But Brandon Taylor, Spears’ attorney, said prosecutors are pointing the finger at that wrong person.

Spears, he said, was “not involved in this tragic incident.”

“Those students deserve justice,” Taylor said in his opening statement.

“But convicting an innocent kid,” he added, “is not justice.”

Earlier this week, Thiru Vignarajah, an attorney for the Dorsey family, held a news conference outside the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse and told reporters that loved ones have “waited a long time for justice.”

Dorsey was a loving and quiet child who enjoyed playing basketball and video games and eating cereal with milk, according to his obituary. He was affectionally known as “Dink.”

Vignarajah called the start of the trial “an important chapter for this family as they seek a measure of justice, a measure of comfort, a measure of closure.”

“The family is here to remind the world that their son has not been forgotten — that there is a hole in their hearts that no courtroom will fill,” Vignarajah said. “But that they hope and pray that a measure of justice is delivered in the days to come.”