A jury was still out late Friday afternoon in Kenneth Burns’ Gary murder trial.
Burns, 52, is accused of fatally shooting Andre White, 39, on June 8, 2022. White’s partly burned body was later found in a grassy lot. Burns has pleaded not guilty. Jury deliberations began Thursday afternoon.
More information was not immediately available.
Vernon Reeves testified Tuesday he was upstairs with his girlfriend at Burns’ home on the 2600 block of W. 17th Avenue when she heard “fireworks.” When Burns walked up, knocked on his door and then the men went back downstairs, Andre White, 39, appeared to be slumped over, shot dead.
Why did you do that, he asked. “Because he talked too much,” Reeves recalled Burns said.
Deputy Prosecutor Jacquelyn Altpeter said in closing arguments Thursday that Burns’ actions in the weeks until his June 29, 2022 arrest were suspicious.
He agreed to talk to a detective, then canceled. Investigators found White’s blood in the back of Burns’ Dodge Durango after a search warrant. On June 19, Burns’ family called the police for a welfare check. His house had been “barricaded.” Burns was later arrested on June 29 in an abandoned house.
“He murdered Andre White and he knows it,” she told jurors. In his first jailhouse call, he said, “Well, they got me,” she said.
Reeves — a longtime friend who was renting a room from Burns — testified he saw Burns with a gun in his hand, Altpeter said, then Burns asked him to help hide the body.
Defense lawyer Scott King told the jury he was there to make “the government play by the rules.”
All they had was Reeves’ testimony, he said. Police didn’t go to the crime scene at the house for eight days. They used luminite to find blood in the Durango, which had likely been cleaned, but didn’t use it in the home, he said.
Reeves’ word by itself “would never be sufficient,” King later said.
Altpeter later said King wanted to blame Reeves, “the only person who did the right thing in the entire case.”
Investigations are “not perfect”, she said. “This is not TV. Nothing goes according to plan all the time.”