Families of two victims of fatal CT shooting in 2016 seeking long-awaited resolution to deaths
During hours of testimony on the first day of the trial for Brandon Letman this week, Ashley Spence’s sisters scarcely stopped crying as they sat in the courtroom.
The tears continued to fall as more and more witnesses were called to the stand to testify in Letman’s case Wednesday, nearly eight years after 21-year-old Spence and 19-year-old Cameron Mounds, Jr. were gunned down.
Letman, 31, is charged in connection with the death of Spence and Mounds in Hartford during the summer of 2016, following a scam trade of fake drugs for a fake gun.
A double-cross scam allegedly led to a fatal CT shooting. The man who got fake ‘cocaine’ faces trial
The first witness called to the stand Wednesday, Desrene Taylor, told Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Robin Krawczyk that on June 21, 2016, she rushed outside to find Spence shot in the driveway near her apartment on Enfield Street in the Hartford’s North End.
Taylor, who also wiped away tears from her seat on the witness stand, testified that she heard Spence’s dying words.
She said she remembered asking Spence what happened to her.
“I got shot,” she said Spence replied.
“That was the first time we ever heard that,” said Autumn Spence, Spence’s youngest sister, as she rapidly tried to wipe away the tears falling from her eyes outside the courtroom.
“She broke my heart,” she said.
Spence’s older sister, Trevana Sumlin, said the hardest part of the trial was “having to live through some of the evidence.”
Although the shooting was eight years ago and was considered a cold case until Letman’s arrest in 2019, Autumn Spence, said “it feels like yesterday.”
Spence’s mother, LaTanya Sumlin, reached behind her to grip her daughter’s hand as witnesses walked prosecutors through photos of the crime scene on Wednesday, showing the spot where Spence lay dying in the driveway. She was rushed to a hospital but died on the way there, records show, while Mounds died at the scene.
Letman is accused of shooting both of them and injured a third person after he and Mounds both duped each other in a drug deal gone wrong — Mounds giving Letman fake cocaine, and Letman giving Mounds a fake firearm, according to court records.
After realizing the drugs were fake, an arrest warrant affidavit for Letman alleges that he returned to the Enfield Street apartment and opened fire on Mounds and others who were outside, including Spence, then he took off.
“It was all for nothing, like for fake drugs? What?” said LaTanya Sumlin.
Spence’s mother said her grief feels just as strong as it did after the shooting.
“It’s been so long, since 2016, but it’s dragging on and it still hurts so much,” she said. “It’s like you lost your limb and you learn how to live without it.”
While Trevana Sumlin said they just want justice for their sister, Autumn Spence said she doesn’t know if that’s possible.
“I don’t think I’m going to get the justice that I want for her, I don’t think there’s any real justification after he robbed us of this.”
The night before the trial began, Trevana Sumlin said their mother sent them a text message saying Spence was the glue that held their family together.
“She was the glue, as the middle child she got in with the older kids, and she got in with the younger kids,” she said.
Ashley Spence loved basketball and was attending college after graduating from Cromwell High School. She was popular, they said, and was always taking someone under her wing. “She was very social, she was the one who always brought someone home with her for Thanksgiving, even though there were already seven of us,” Trevana Sumlin said.
For Lawrence Mounds Sr., Cameron Mounds’ uncle, justice came the day Letman was arrested.
He said he plans to attend the trial in place of Mounds’ mother and father, for whom reliving the evidence may be too hard.
On Wednesday, prosecutors showed the jury a photo of Mounds’ body covered with a white sheet at the base of a staircase by the back door of the apartment. When that photo was shown, Mounts Sr. hung his head in his hands and was visibly shaky.
Michael Kuchy, then an officer with the Hartford Police Department, took the stand and said he was one of the first officers on the scene. When he saw Spence, he said, he “could tell that she was having trouble breathing.”
He rushed to hand over an oxygen tank to another responding officer.
“That’s when I was flagged down by multiple people, they were yelling that there was another victim across the street,” he said. Duchy ran across the street and found Mounds slumped in the back door way of a multi-family home.
“He wasn’t breathing,” he said. “It’s hard to say … he was lifeless.”
Mounds Sr. said that to him, it does not matter how much time Letman is sentenced to if convicted.
“This is the closure part,” he said gesturing to the courtroom from the hall just outside. “That’s all I ever wanted. I don’t want (anything) else but closure.”
“After this, I go to lunch, I go home,” he added. “I get to hold my children.”
On Wednesday, prosecutors called eyewitnesses and law enforcement officers to the stand, each walking the jury through the events of the day of the shooting.
Daquan Artis, known as “Quan” or “Little S,” was brought to the stand after being transported from the Department of Correction where he is in custody in connection to other cases.
Artis has multiple pending cases in Connecticut criminal courts, including one in which he is charged with murder in connection to an incident in Hartford on July 19, 2021.
According to a warrant for Letman’s arrest, a witness told police that they were with Mounds and Spence the day of the homicides when Mounds allegedly “wanted to trade fake drugs to a kid from New Britain in exchange for a .40 caliber handgun.”
After they made the trade, they alleged that Letman and “Little S” came back to the Enfield Street house asking for Mounds. That’s when Mounds, Spence and Harold “Oink” Cook were shot.
Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and shackles on the stand, Artis told a judge Wednesday that he had not wanted to come to court that morning to testify and that he did not remember anything from the day of the shooting. A statement he gave cold case investigators in 2019, however, told a different story.
In part of that statement, Artis described seeing a man he knew only by his first name Brandon allegedly walk up to Mounds, raise his arm and fire shots. He later identified Letman in a photo lineup.
Artis said in the statement that when looking at the lineup, he picked out “the guy I knew as Brandon from New Britain,” who he said he saw fire at people on Enfield Street that day in June.
The jury saw a video recording of Artis sitting in a room with a detective, looking at the photo lineup from which he identified Letman.
“I don’t know his last name but that’s 100% him,” Artis’ statement said.
On the stand, Artis claimed that he only identified Letman as the gunman, because police were harassing him.
When prosecutors asked him why his story changed, he said “because I was being harassed by the police over and over and I was told that if I didn’t cooperate with them I would be a suspect. Everything was false.”
“You blamed someone else for a murder and you’re saying that was not true?” asked Krawczyk.
“Yep,” Artis replied, adding “I went by what the streets (were) saying.”
Cold Case Unit Inspector Douglas Jowett said on the stand Wednesday that police were not harassing him, nor going to his family member’s homes.
On Thursday, witnesses included three women who were on Enfield Street when the shooting happened. They testified to seeing Artis and another man walking toward the apartment where Mounds was that afternoon. Then they heard gunshots ring out and saw Artis, the man he was with and other people running from the scene.
One woman recalled seeing Spence lying shot in the driveway.
“Everybody was screaming. They called 911 and the ambulance came,” she said, and then an older woman came out of an apartment across the street, screaming “There’s a body behind my house, there’s a body behind my house.”
She said she saw Artis and the man he was with run away, but said she didn’t see either carrying a weapon.
“I didn’t see a gun,” she said when cross-examined by Letman’s defense attorney.
Later in the day, law enforcement officials testified about evidence collected from the scene, including blood-stained clothes Mounds was wearing and multiple shell casings.
Letman is being held in lieu of a $2 million bond and is facing multiple charges, including murder and tampering with witnesses.