An Ansonia man accused of shooting a distant cousin to death outside a Derby bar is due to go on trial April 1, and potential witnesses include cops and convicts involved in a massive police probe of a drug-dealing organization allegedly headed by the shooting victim.
Jury selection began Tuesday (Feb. 25) at Superior Court in Milford in the case of Cordaryl Silva, 26, accused of murdering Javon Zimmerman, who was 22 when he was killed outside RJ’s Cafe on Elizabeth Street in the early morning hours of May 12, 2012.
Background
At the time of his death, Zimmerman was one of the chief targets of an Ansonia police drug investigation.
In court papers police described the Zimmerman crew as “the main street-level suppliers of crack-cocaine in Ansonia and the surrounding Valley towns.”
At the time of the shooting, Silva had been working secretly with Ansonia police for months as a confidential informant, providing police with inside information about how the crew worked, ranging from where the crew allegedly stashed crack cocaine on High Street to the location of a .45 caliber handgun in Derby.
When Derby police charged Silva with Zimmerman’s murder about a month after the shooting, they said in an arrest warrant that Silva became increasingly angry with the Zimmerman family because they stopped giving money to Silva’s brother for the prison commissary.
Silva, who Derby police said was immediately identified as a suspect in Zimmerman’s shooting, has been behind bars since six days after Zimmerman’s death, when he was arrested on a probation violation charge.
Potential Witnesses
As part of the jury selection process Tuesday, the prosecutor in the case, Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Charles Stango, read a list of more than three dozen potential witnesses he may call during the trial.
Stango said he doesn’t anticipate eliciting testimony from “anywhere near that number” of people, but was required to alert potential jurors to any possible witnesses to prevent anyone who knows any of them from sitting on the jury.
The witness list includes police from five different law enforcement agencies — cops from Derby, Ansonia, Shelton, and Naugatuck, as well as state troopers — including Ansonia Detective Kristen Hunt, who was receiving information from Silva about the Zimmerman crew and who helped Derby police locate and interview Silva in the days immediately after the shooting.
Stango also listed nearly 30 “civilian witnesses,” several of whom were themselves accused of involvement in Zimmerman’s drug-dealing crew.
Those names include three alleged lieutenants in the Zimmerman crew — Tyquan Bailey, Quayshaun Rhodes, and Quandre Howell.
All three are currently in jail on drug charges.
Anticipating challenges to their credibility, Stango quizzed prospective jurors on whether they could maintain impartiality regarding testimony from certain witnesses.
He asked whether they’d be able to evaluate witnesses on the basis of their testimony alone, and not give any “bonus points” to police witnesses just because they wear a badge and uniform.
Conversely, he asked jurors, could they maintain the same impartiality if a witness were clad in a uniform of a different sort — that of an inmate at a correctional institution?
Jury Selection
The first two prospective jurors interviewed Tuesday — a systems administrator from Oxford and an engineer who works for Sikorsky — were accepted by Stango and Silva’s lawyer, Lawrence Hopkins.
By the end of the day they had selected a total of six jurors, according to the court clerk’s office.
Jury selection will continue this week until a panel of 12 jurors and four alternates is selected.
Silva is being held at Northern Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Somers, on bonds totaling more than $2 million.
In addition to the murder charge, he is also accused of violating the terms of probation he received in a 2007 case in which he was convicted of sale of a controlled substance, but Judge Markle herself will render a decision on the probation violation charge based on evidence presented during the trial.
