Richland jury acquits alleged lookout in Columbia bagel baker’s slaying

A Richland County jury late Friday found the alleged lookout not guilty of murder in the notorious 2013 killing of Kelly Hunnewell, a single mother shot to death while she was baking bagels in a Beltline Boulevard neighborhood to supply a downtown eatery.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated four hours before returning its verdict around 8:30 pm to a nearly empty Richland County courthouse in downtown Columbia.

“You are free to go,” state Judge Deadra Jefferson told a stunned Troy Stevenson, 23, who has been in the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center for more than five years awaiting trial. An earlier trial, in 2015, ended in a mistrial.

Stevenson had been charged with murder, attempted armed robbery, kidnapping and second-degree burglary. The courtroom was hushed as the clerk of court intoned “not guilty” after reading each charge.

“Thank God,” Stevenson whispered to his attorney, Aimee Zmroczek, after the final verdict, Zmroczek told a reporter later.

Stevenson and two other teens were arrested shortly after Hunnewell’s slaying on July 1, 2013. The other two, who evidence showed went inside Hunnewell’s commercial kitchen and killed her, were convicted of murder in 2014.

“It was a tough case. Her death was tragic and awful. The two people who were responsible for that were convicted. The person who wasn’t, was acquitted,” Zmroczek said. “The jury system has done the right thing.”

Although prosecutors acknowledged that Stevenson was not one of the shooters, they argued “the hand of one is the hand of all” and that as lookout, he was just as responsible.

The issue before the jury was whether Stevenson had been – as prosecutors alleged – a lookout for the two men who shot Hunnewell to death or – in the defense’s version – an innocent young man, at the time age 18, whose mother had sent him out in the middle of the night to find his half-brother and bring him home.

The verdict came on the fifth day of a trial that began Monday. Prosecutors put up 23 witnesses; the defense, six, including Stevenson.

During his testimony Friday morning, Stevenson openly admitted he did drugs, indicated he hung around with a gang and had in the past owned a variety of guns. But on that night, he insisted he had no weapons and had happened upon a crime in progress.

He also freely acknowledged on the witness stand that he knew his brother, Trenton Barnes, then 16, and a friend, Lorenzo Young, then 18, were going to stage a robbery, and he admitted lying to police and telling them he was home in bed at the time before finally telling them he had failed to stop his brother from being in a robbery.

Throughout the week, the normally quiet courtroom had been riven by the blood-curdling screams of Hunnewell, followed by six rapid gun shots. The screams — and video — were captured on a surveillance camera at a nearby building. The prosecution played the tape repeatedly.

“Those screams are the screams for justice. We haven’t got there yet. But we are going to get there,” prosecutor Knox McMahon told the jury of six men and six women in a closing argument Friday. “Go where the evidence takes you.”

Other video, played repeatedly for jurors, had been captured by surveillance cameras inside the commercial kitchen where the 33-year-old Hunnewell worked. That video depicted the sudden entry of two men, their faces hidden by pulled-up hoodies.

The two had planned to rob a nearby bar, prosecutors allege. But it was closed. So they invaded Hunnewell’s nearby bakery, where she had been working with the door open.

Hunnewell reacted by lashing out at one with a long-handled steel cooking spoon and, then, was shot. Of the six shots fired, only one hit her, near her collarbone, but it was fatal.

The incident lasted less than 30 seconds. The robber-killers got nothing; there was no money. Hunnewell bled to death from her wound within minutes.

McMahon told the jury that the two convicted gunmen needed a lookout to alert them to police, and Stevenson was that lookout.

Young is serving a life sentence without parole, and Barnes is serving a 50-year sentence.

Stevenson had been out of work for two months, McMahon told jurors, and needed money. That night, he alleged, he was along “to share in the booty.”

Stevenson’s attorney Zmroczek told jurors the prosecution’s case was circumstantial. No fingerprints, no DNA, no gunshot residue linked Stevenson to the crime, and no camera captured a clear image of him, she said. Jurors can’t convict unless they are “certain beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said.

Another surveillance camera captured an image of a man in a hoodie sticking his head in the door of the bakery while Barnes and Young were killing Hunnewell.

But that camera also captured the man putting his hand to his face – in shock and surprise at what was happening, Zmroczek told jurors.

“Isn’t it just as possible that Troy was coming to look for his brother?” Zmroczek asked.

But McMahon told jurors not to buy that version of events.

“There were three people involved – two gunmen and one lookout,” McMahon said.

Judge Jefferson told jurors that someone’s presence at the scene of a crime is not sufficient to prove their part in a crime. To prove a person was an accomplice, the state has to provide evidence the person was an active participant, she told jurors.

Prosecutor McMahon said later, “I trust the American people. The jury heard it. They got our evidence. They got their evidence. I think it came down to reasonable doubt.”

This story was originally published December 14, 2018 at 9:54 PM.