Com. v. Alwan, Y.

CourtSuperior Court of Pennsylvania
DecidedNovember 19, 2014
Docket2619 EDA 2013
StatusUnpublished

This text of Com. v. Alwan, Y. (Com. v. Alwan, Y.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Superior Court of Pennsylvania primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Com. v. Alwan, Y., (Pa. Ct. App. 2014).

Opinion

J-A25023-14

NON-PRECEDENTIAL DECISION - SEE SUPERIOR COURT I.O.P. 65.37

COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA Appellee

v.

YUWSHA ALWAN

Appellant No. 2619 EDA 2013

Appeal from the Judgment of Sentence of August 16, 2013 In the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County Criminal Division at No.: CP-51-CR-0012299-2011

BEFORE: DONOHUE, J., WECHT, J., and PLATT, J.*

MEMORANDUM BY WECHT, J.: FILED NOVEMBER 19, 2014

Yuwsha Alwan appeals the judgment of sentence entered on August

16, 2013. We affirm.

The trial court set forth the pertinent factual and procedural history of

this case as follows:

On March 31, 2008, Nicholas Pisano was shot in his apartment at 356 N. Front Street in Philadelphia. Emergency personnel took him to Hahnemann University Hospital, where he died on that same day. He was twenty-five years old at the time of his death.

Philadelphia Police Officer Quinten White was the first police officer to arrive at the scene of the shooting, where he observed a small quantity of marijuana on a living room table and a [MAC-10] automatic weapon in the bedroom, on the bed, partially covered by a sheet. [Officer White] spoke to Joshua McDonald, who was in the apartment at the time of the shooting, ____________________________________________

* Retired Senior Judge assigned to the Superior Court. J-A25023-14

and who told him that two [b]lack men in their [thirties] wearing dark clothing came to the door purporting to be making a pizza delivery, and that the men shot Pisano and then fled the scene. As Officer White was pulling up to the scene, he inadvertently drove over a pizza box.

***

[McDonald] came to visit Pisano in the afternoon on the day of the shooting. He and Pisano watched a movie and played video games together. While the movie was playing, an African- American man with what McDonald described as a “Muslim- sounding name” came to the door and spoke with Pisano for about five minutes. Pisano briefly introduced him to McDonald, but McDonald [could] not recall his name or identify him.

Later that night, McDonald heard a knock on the door and a male voice saying “pizza delivery.” Pisano replied “we already got our food[,]” as the two men had ordered delivery earlier. The voice said[,] “well, just open the door.” Pisano said[,] “[i]t must be around back. It happens all the time.” Again, the voice said “just open the door.”

McDonald did not feel comfortable with the interaction, which did not feel “right” to him, so he retrieved the gun that Pisano had shown him earlier in the evening, which was hidden in the couch where he was sitting. As [McDonald] reached down for the gun, he heard a shot. When he looked up, Pisano had fallen. He saw someone coming through the doorway and he pointed the gun toward them and tried to shoot. When he pulled the trigger, nothing happened, but the intruder ran. He saw a second man, but did not get a good look at him. He gave a statement to [h]omicide detectives a few hours after the shooting, in which he identified the shooter as [Joseph] Harville.[1]

Trial Court Opinion (“T.C.O.”), 11/13/2013, at 2-5 (citations to notes of

testimony omitted).

____________________________________________

1 Harville is Alwan’s nephew.

-2- J-A25023-14

Homicide detectives found approximately seven pounds of marijuana

in Pisano’s apartment, which they estimated to have a street value of

$31,728. They also obtained surveillance video from a security camera

located outside of Pisano’s apartment building. Clyde Frazier, an officer with

the Philadelphia Police Department’s Crime Scene Unit, recovered

fingerprints from the pizza box found outside of Pisano’s apartment and

matched those prints to Robert Gray, Harville’s life-long friend. At the time

of the shooting, Gray had known Alwan through Harville for approximately

three or four years.

After finding out that his fingerprints had been identified on the pizza box and [that] the police had video footage of him with Harville outside of Pisano’s [apartment] building on the night of the shooting, Gray gave a full confession to his involvement in the shooting. The surveillance video depicts Gray and Harville walking back and forth outside of [Pisano’s] building, [with] Gray holding a pizza box and Harville with his hands in his pockets.

In his statement of April 4, 2008, [Gray] said the following about what happened four days earlier on the night of the shooting:

[W]e just hung out for a little while, that’s when [Alwan] starts talking about this dude that had all this weed. He said he just left the boy’s house and the guy had like ten pounds of weed in the dryer and some on his countertop. He said the boy had a lot of money in a Nike box under the table in the back room where the dog was. [Alwan] was like ‘we should roll on the boy.’ He said the guy was a punk and that we wouldn’t have to do nothing but scare the boy. We all agreed and then [Alwan] gave [Harville] the gun.

[Gray explained that,] after ordering a pizza and driving to pick it up, the three defendants proceeded as follows:

I parked the car under the bridge around the corner from the boy’s house, then me and [Harville] and [Alwan]

-3- J-A25023-14

walked around to the house. [Alwan] walked a little bit behind us and showed us where the house was at. Then he stayed back while me and [Harville] went to the dude’s house. I walked up the steps first and [Harville] was behind me. I still had the pizza with me. And when [Harville] rang the doorbell, he says ‘[d]elivery.’ The guy inside opens the door and says ‘wrong bell. You want the back.’ He had a Bible in his hands and said like two more times ‘you want the back.’ He’s like, ‘I’m telling you, you got the wrong apartment. It happens all the time. You want the back door.’ I said, ‘no I want some weed.’ He was like, ‘you definitely got the wrong house.’

That’s when [Harville] come up behind and he pushes past me. He knocked the pizza out of my hand when [he] pushed me. As [Harville] pushed past me, the guy must have seen the gun because he looked shocked. That’s when I noticed [there] was another guy inside on the couch . . . . The guy on the couch grabs a gun from under a pillow. [He s]tood up pointing at us. At that point I ducked and started to run. That’s when [Harville] shot. I was already down the steps by the time [Harville] shot then I was gone. I ran to the car and [Alwan] was already in the driver’s seat. I got in the backseat and [Harville] came up behind me and got into the front passenger seat. He still had the gun in his hand. Then we just took off.

Id. at 3-4.

William Shute, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of

Investigation, analyzed Alwan’s cellular phone records from March 31, 2008

through April 10, 2008. Special Agent Shute’s analysis revealed that Alwan

and Gray had exchanged seventy-five calls during that period. Twenty-nine

of those calls took place on the day of the shooting and twenty-three of

them occurred on the following day. Alwan also made an outgoing call at

9:33 p.m. on March 31, 2008; approximately two minutes before Pisano was

murdered. Based upon the location of the cellular tower that Alwan’s phone

-4- J-A25023-14

used to place that call, Special Agent Shute determined that it was made

within several blocks of the shooting.

Police arrested Gray and Harville in connection with Pisano’s murder.

On June 13, 2011, Gray pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, conspiracy to

commit murder, possession of an instrument of crime, and robbery.2 As a

condition of Gray’s guilty plea, he agreed to assist the Commonwealth with

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