PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Attorneys for Maurice Hill, the man on trial for shooting half a dozen Philadelphia police officers in 2019 in the Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood of North Philadelphia, began their case Tuesday morning, calling a prominent defense attorney as their first witness.
Shaka Johnson testified that on the night of Aug. 14, 2019, Hill called him in chaos, “speaking very quickly” and “in a loud whisper,” saying police were trying to kill him and he didn’t want to die.
Johnson said Hill was a friend. He previously represented him in court, and in 2018, they met up at a bar in Atlanta after the Eagles won the Super Bowl.
He said he hadn’t talked to Hill since then, but he received a frantic phone call from him that night, which turned into an eight-hour standoff with police at a home near 15th Street and Erie Avenue.
Johnson said as he was speaking to Hill, police would interrupt their conversation, and he felt like any progress he would make to get him out of the house would stall.
In court on Tuesday, the assistant district attorney, who works under District Attorney Larry Krasner, asked if Johnson was ever on a three-way phone call with Krasner and Hill. Johnson skirted the question and never said whether that phone call happened.
Authorities said there was a three-way phone call between them, but prosecutors stopped short of getting into what that phone call was about.
However, Johnson did say he made a separate phone call to Krasner that night. After speaking with Hill, he eventually called Krasner, someone he had known for years.
Hill’s defense said they wanted to include Johnson as a witness to zero in on Hill’s frame of mind at the time. The prosecution has argued that none of it is relevant because it happened after the crimes in question. The defense conceded that Hill shot the cops but argued it was because he believed they were intruders.