By Alexandra Quillici
The months-long burglary trial of Joseph Hernandez, Rakhem Bradford, and Joshua Givens has an end in sight as final witnesses, talk of closing statements, and the tail end of evidence are being overviewed.
Tuesday began with Rakhem Bradford’s defense attorney Ava Landers questioning Sergeant Michael Munoz about Bradford’s phone. Essentially, most posts of Bradford’s consisted of the same photos of the same laptops, with captions that sold different laptops than what was pictured. The photos did not match the captions.
Therefore, Ms. Landers argued that Munoz never showed burglarized victims the actual photos of laptops on Bradford’s Instagram. In other words, none of the photos attached to his account were ever solidified as being stolen. Yes, he was selling laptops, but Munoz couldn’t confirm that the photos featured were stolen items.
Munoz did show five photos from the Instagram account to victims. During the investigation the five photos from Bradford’s Instagram were not identified by any of the victims who reported stolen laptops.
Texts from Joseph Hernandez’s phone were read, with lines of “I need you selling things bro” and “bro I got some merchandise for you.” Bradford’s cell phone was not included in these group text messages.
Even though Bradford did not “live” at the house where burglarized items were stored, he did describe himself as “staying there” for a few nights at a time. Bradford was initially arrested because of the watch on his arm, the weed in a tub associated with him, and an Xbox in the living room. A housemate was not arrested because the police felt he could provide them valuable information – however, the housemate was found to have weed and stolen items also (but not a part of this trial).
Supervising Deputy District Attorney Michelle Serafin then started to question Munoz, trying to establish that the same photos on Bradford’s Instagram were being used to advertise different products. Some of the laptop products have been identified by burglarized victims as laptops they recognized as their own.
Ms. Serafin also attempted to link Bradford’s Instagram as his own, with only his own posts (no other contributors). Photos of hands holding money were shown to the jury, where Munoz suspected that it was Bradford’s hand but did not confirm.
Defense attorneys brought up that Bradford’s phone was linked to different Apple ID accounts, generating more speculation of the defendant’s posts and who was truly behind the posts.
Two other witnesses were brought forward for less than five minutes each to confirm the physical descriptions given of the people they saw burglarizing.
Sergeant Munoz returned to the stand for the afternoon court session. The trial is beginning to prepare for closing statements, as the trickle of final witnesses are planned to be brought forth for quick refreshers for the jury.
