Published: Friday, January 28, 2011, 10:59 PM Updated: Friday, January 28, 2011, 11:01 PM
By Lisa Coryell/The Times
TRENTON — Nearly six years after Kendra DeGrasse was killed execution style, allegedly for testifying against her ex-boyfriend in a gang trial, four men have been indicted for her murder, prosecutors announced yesterday.
Anthony Kidd, 38, who allegedly ordered the hit on his ex-girlfriend from behind bars, and his cousin, Darrell Scott, 40, who allegedly was paid to pull the trigger, face life in prison without parole if convicted.
The men are the first in Mercer County to be prosecuted for aggravated murder, a charge that carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole. It was created when New Jersey abolished the death penalty in 2007.
The charge covers the most heinous crimes, including elimination of a witness and murder for hire.
DeGrasse, a mother of two, was killed in March 2005 not only because her testimony 20 months earlier had helped put Kidd behind bars for shooting a cop, but to eliminate her as a witness if his case were overturned on appeal and he was retried.
“This case cries out to be prosecuted,” said Mercer County Prosecutor Joseph Bocchini. “Whenever you have witnesses who are being taken out for their testimony, the people who perpetrate these crimes need to be brought to justice and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Also indicted in DeGrasse’s murder were Henry Kidd, 40, and Antonio Merritt, 31. Merritt supplied the gun Scott used to kill DeGrasse, prosecutors said. Both men were indicted on weapons offenses.
Henry Kidd allegedly helped hatch the plot to kill his younger brother’s ex-girlfriend.
“Here you have a mother of two children who was senselessly taken,” Bocchini said. “Her children will be deprived of growing up knowing their mother.”
Prosecutors say Anthony Kidd, while incarcerated at Northern State Prison in Newark in 2005, used a smuggled cell phone to place calls to his brother and Scott to orchestrate DeGrasse’s murder.
Scott traveled from Alabama to the Trenton area in March 2005 for the sole purpose of killing DeGrasse, prosecutors said. In addition to giving Scott the order to kill DeGrasse, Anthony Kidd used the cell phone to call DeGrasse and lure her to the location of the hit, prosecutors said.
DeGrasse was shot three times in the head as she sat in her car on White Street near Passaic Street waiting to meet with Scott, who she believed was coming to give her money to deliver to Kidd in prison.
According to Assistant Prosecutor Lew Korngut, who presented the case to a grand jury this week, detectives used the locations of the cell phone towers that transmitted Scott’s phone calls to track his journey from Alabama, up Interstate 95, into Trenton and finally to the block where DeGrasse was shot. Cell tower “hits” then show Scott traveled back to Alabama the day after the murder, Korngut said.
At the time of the shooting, Anthony Kidd was serving a 35-year sentence for attempted murder on a police officer in a 2001 shooting. At the time of his trial, Kidd had threatened to kill DeGrasse if she testified against him. Intimidated, DeGrasse took the stand and recanted what she had told police in 2001 — that Kidd had arrived at her apartment and told her he had been in a shootout and crashed his car. But it was too late. DeGrasse’s statement to police was enough to help persuade jurors that Kidd was guilty.
In explaining the aggravated murder charges against Anthony Kidd and Scott, Korngut said crimes against witnesses shake the criminal justice system to its core.
“The whole system breaks down if witnesses are not willing to come forward and cooperate,” Korngut said.
In addition to murder and conspiracy charges, the four men were also indicted on charges of felony murder, robbery, retaliation against a witness and hindering apprehension and prosecution.
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