NORRISTOWN, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — The murder trial of two people prosecutors say were part of a murder-for-hire shooting outside of a Cheltenham Dunkin' drive-thru last April is underway.
In opening statements, prosecutor Caroline Goldstein told jurors there are two defendants in the case of 35-year-old school teacher Rachel King’a murder: 34-year-old Zakkee Alhakim, who she says pulled the trigger, and 35-year-old Julie Jean, who she said pulled the strings.
Goldstein says Jean seduced William Hayes, King’s longtime, on-and-off boyfriend. And when Hayes broke off the affair to return to King, Jean devised a plan to kill King and set it in motion.
On April 11, around 7:30 a.m., while taking her 11-year-old son to his violin lesson, stopped at a Dunkin’ drive-thru on East Cheltenham Avenue. While King waited in the drive-thru line, a man with a gun is seen on surveillance video approaching the car on foot and firing six shots through the driver’s side window, hitting King five times at close range.
King’s son was sitting in the back seat when he became an unwitting witness to his mother’s murder. He was not physically injured — but jurors heard from the police officers who found the boy hiding in the back seat.
One officer testified, after he was taken from the car, the boy was on the phone with his aunt asking why no one was helping his mother, and why wasn’t she on the way to the hospital.
Prosecutors say evidence shows 34-year-old Zakkee Alhakim is the gunman seen in the video, and that cell phone data, including messages deleted from Jean’s phone, will connect her to Alhakim and connect the pair of them to the murder.
Jean’s attorney, Shaka Johnson, fired back, saying though prosecutors tried to make it sound like Jean was a homewrecker, Hayes was the one having the affair. Johnson says all Jean did wrong was meet a guy who “was a two-timer.”
Defense attorneys say, while the case is incredibly tragic and sad, jurors need to look at the evidence, which they say does not link Jean nor Alhakim to the murder.
Alhakim’s lawyer, Ben Cooper, says the evidence won’t prove Alhakim was the shooter.