Trial begins of man accused of killing another man for headphones

CHRISTIAN MASSEY, a "big guy" and "gentle giant," was ambushed by a gunman who wanted to rob Massey of his headphones two days after Thanksgiving 2013, a prosecutor told a Common Pleas jury yesterday.

Massey, 21, a special-needs man who was mainstreamed into Marple Newtown High and graduated from the Delaware County school, had just bought his $300 Beats by Dr. Dre headphones at a Best Buy on that Black Friday after Thanksgiving. He was a "tech kid" and loved his new headphones, Assistant District Attorney Brendan O'Malley said.

That Saturday afternoon, Nov. 30, 2013, Massey went to a Cricket Wireless store on Lancaster Avenue near 56th Street to pay his aunt's cellphone bill, then was walking to a friend's house, cutting through an alley behind Lebanon Avenue near Upland Way, when Arkel Garcia, then 19, sneaked up behind him, the prosecutor said.

"When Christian Massey fought back to protect the headphones he had purchased just the day before," Garcia fired his gun three times, the prosecutor said.

After getting hit twice, once in the right arm and once in the chest, Massey "slowly died in that alleyway," the prosecutor said in his opening statement at Garcia's murder trial. "Police found him. Nothing could be done."

O'Malley said that Garcia "voluntarily" went to talk to homicide detectives, who were canvassing the neighborhood for information, and told them "things only the shooter knows. He confesses."

He signed a written statement and confessed in a video statement, the prosecutor said.

But defense attorney Joshua Scarpello told jurors that Garcia was not at the murder scene.

What authorities are calling Garcia's "confession" was instead a "recorded statement" taken after "my client was scooped up from the neighborhood" about 1 p.m. Dec. 7, 2013, and kept for more than 24 hours in a windowless room at police headquarters without access to his mother or a lawyer, Scarpello said.

Scarpello said that during that time, Garcia slept on a table. He said that his client was not given food or water during the 24 hours before a homicide detective went in to talk to him.

The case has "no eyewitnesses" and "no physical evidence," such as fingerprints or DNA, that tie Garcia to the murder, Scarpello said.

In addition to seeing Garcia's statement, the jury of 10 women and two men is expected to see a video from a house that shows Massey walking in the alley that afternoon, and a man behind him.

Massey, a native of West Philadelphia, was sent as a ward of the state at age 12 to live in a group home at Don Guanella Village, a residential campus for the intellectually disabled, owned by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

The hulking 6-foot-2, 300-pound mentally disabled man attended Marple Newtown High for six years, graduating in June 2013. He played two years of varsity football and one year of varsity basketball, endearing himself to many at the school along the way.