Staff photo / Ed Runyan Lou DeFabio, attorney for Brandon Crump Jr., listens during Monday’s trial in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court while county assistant prosecutor Mike Yacovone is seated below DeFabio. The trial resumes this morning.

YOUNGSTOWN — Testimony Monday focused on high-tech ways that investigators and scientists with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation collaborated to use scientific evidence to tie Brandon Crump Jr. to the scene of the Sept. 21, 2020, shooting death of Rowan Sweeney, 4.

Crump, 21, is on trial on aggravated murder, four counts of attempted murder and many other charges in the death of Rowan and the shootings of four adults at a home in Struthers.

The trial resumes this morning before Judge Anthony D’Apolito of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.

Four witnesses testified to searching phones and phone records of individuals connected to the case and uncovering photos, text messages, phone-call records and the location of the cellphones at various times before and after the 1:50 a.m. gun assault. Authorities believe the shootings started as a robbery.

Prosecutors said in opening statements last week that text messages show that co-defendant Andre McCoy Jr. texted his then-girlfriend, Cassandra Marsicola, from inside of the Perry Street home early Sept. 21 that he was going to rob Yarnell Green of thousands in cash. Green had set the money on a table, causing McCoy to text co-defendant Kimonie Bryant to set up the robbery, prosecutors allege.

McCoy, Marsicola, Green and Rowan’s mother, Alexis Schneider, all became gunshot victims when a male came through the front door and shot everyone, including Rowan.

Prosecutors said photos taken from Crump’s phone show a male with a red sleeve holding lots of cash within an hour of the shootings. Data from the phone also yielded a video taken a week earlier of a handgun like the one used in the shootings, according to Monday’s testimony.

Prosecutors said last week cellphone tower data would place Crump and Bryant at the Perry Street home at the exact time of the shootings, as well as in the area where Bryant lives in Youngstown an hour before the shootings.

Most of Monday’s testimony was an effort to substantiate those allegations.

One witness Monday was Michelle Smith, an analyst with Ohio HIDTA, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program. She explained that her role in the case was to take data gathered by BCI, which is an arm of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, and turn it into “intelligence.” In this case, she worked with the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force, another multi-jurisdictional law enforcement group, she said.

HIDTA is part of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. HIDTA provides assistance to federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies operating in areas determined to be critical drug-trafficking regions, according to the HIDTA website.

Smith said her task was to take the cellphone data collected by BCI and present the results in a “much more readable format.”

Under questioning by Mike Yacovone, lead prosecutor in the case, Smith said she reviewed cellphone location data from the phones of Crump and Bryant. She said cellphones communicate with cell towers even when the user is not making a call or texting, and that can happen without the knowledge of the user.

The data has what can be called a “confidence level” of the results, Smith said. The confidence level is classified as either low, meaning no closer than 300 meters from the phone’s actual location; medium, meaning between 100 and 300 meters of the phone’s actual location; and high, meaning under 100 meters from the actual location.

Based on those confidence levels, a visual can be created on a map, showing the low confidence level as a large circle, medium confidence level as a medium circle and a high confidence level as a small circle.

Yacovone showed the video Smith created, which represented the location of the phones of Crump and Bryant before, during and after the shootings. It showed the confidence levels of the locations with smaller or larger circles. The circles showed the phones of Crump and Bryant moving between Youngstown and Struthers before and after the shootings with varying confidence levels.

But the data at 1:50 a.m., at the time the shootings are believed to have taken place, showed a high level of confidence that the phones of Crump and Bryant were close to the Perry Street home in Struthers, according to the video.

Under cross examination by Lou DeFabio, Crump’s attorney, Smith agreed that her job is to “visualize data.”

DeFabio asked, “Do you really understand the sciences of where they get the low confidence, medium confidence and high confidence from?”

“No,” she answered.

“Do you know if it’s ever been tested or not?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she answered.

It took most of the morning for Joanne Gibb, a computer forensic scientist with BCI, to testify about obtaining evidence regarding the phones of various individuals connected to the case. Among the phones was Crump’s.

Another witness was Special Agent Heather Karl of the Ohio Attorney’s Office, who testified about being unable to obtain any surveillance video from homes on Perry Street showing anyone walking into the home where the shootings took place.

Some of the scientific evidence was confusing because the witnesses did not always address the evidence they obtained as belonging to a specific suspect, instead using the names individuals used to create various types of online accounts, such as a Google account.

At times there was confusion about what time various things happened, as a result of having to convert the data from Universal Coordinated Time to Eastern Standard Time.

In many instances, Gibb provided the conversion to Eastern Standard Time to make things less confusing. For instance, she testified about locational data showing an iPhone involved in the case being at 96 Perry St. in Struthers at 1:43 a.m. Sept. 21, 2020, “local time.”

Yacovone asked if that was “nine minutes before dispatch” of Struthers police to the shooting at 111 Perry St.

Gibb said it was. She also agreed that the phone left Perry Street at 1:51 a.m., just after police were dispatched to home. It was unclear, however, whose phone that was, but it was presumably that of Crump or Bryant.